


Goblin Market

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Labyrinth Fusion, Angst, Bitterness, Goblins, Horcruxes, Labyrinth References, Legilimency, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Love, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Obsession, POV Severus Snape, Pining, Poetry, Post-Canon, Post-War, Sexual Tension, Snarry-A-Thon19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-01-31 17:51:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18596389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: The Horcrux is slowly poisoning Harry, whose mind has curled around it in a way to protect it from being dislodged. Severus Snape, resentfully accomplished Legilimens, must navigate the labyrinth of Harry's mind and pull out the infection at the center.





	Goblin Market

**Author's Note:**

> To my influences as always. Christina Rossetti and The National. To David Bowie, to the old Greeks. And Jeanette Winterson, who taught me pleasure in words. The Passion has directly inspired several scenes in here, including the characterization of Voldemort as the rat-eater.
> 
> Prompt: 70: Labyrinth AU. On the brink of death, Severus Snape is trapped in an odd maze with Harry as the Goblin King. What's waiting for him in the centre? Will he ever reach it?

_“‘We must not look at goblin men,_

_We must not buy their fruits:_

_Who knows upon what soil they fed_

_Their hungry thirsty roots?”_

_“Come buy,” call the goblins_

_Hobbling down the glen.’”_

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

 

Consider measurements.

You cannot take an accurate measurement until you know the boundaries of a thing. Upon our first encounters with the sea, when we had looked out to the horizon and saw it had no end, we then assumed that it faded off into forever. Despite impossibility, we have never stopped trying to measure. We know the edges of our oceans now. We can add up coastlines and depths. Sea level to the Challenger Deep, the nuance of inlets and bays. Seas can be measured, yes, we know their boundaries. The sky proves more difficult. Our great explosion out into the nothing, into the beyond. We cannot contemplate where space ends. We try but there is no true demarcation. We can only look at the speed of the race, the laws of the game. Who knows if the rules change out there, somewhere past the horizon? It is not ours to know. We cannot measure it.

The easiest way to measure something is to pick it up and see how it weighs against us. That’s weight. Gravity, our obligation to the earth. Instead, to see the size of something, the volume of a thing, we pull it out and pour a bit of water into the space left behind. Take that water and funnel it into a graduated cylinder, see how high it reaches. When we fall in love, we cannot know the edges of ourselves, our margins fly off into the distance, far out of reach. Instead, we can only see the emptiness burnt into our bodies, our hearts. The hollow, cavernous spots left, like a wound after an abscess. Pour a little water in, a little blood. Fill it up again, these gaping wounds. Into a measuring cup, see how high it goes.

That is how much we have loved. We can compete with it then, the known measures of our wants and aches, our desires and loves. We can say, _objectively speaking_ . We can plan divorces and breakups, match lovers. If you have 5.4 kilograms of love to give, we should find someone with the matching vacancy. At the courts, this old breakdown, we can say, _but your honor, she only loved me 12.6 kg and I loved her 17.8_. Approximately speaking. (Perhaps it is good that we cannot measure.)

Let me write you a love poem. How does it go? If you ask the storytellers how to start, we’re all of a different mind. Back and forth, over and over again. We have our old habits, the _on a dark and stormy nights_ and the _once upon a times_. The problem, the real nugget at the core, is that eventually at the end of the story, someone inevitably asks is that really how it went?

Don't look at me like that, I know what I'm saying to you. Let’s not argue poetry. Go on then, see for yourself. Let us go back first, to the beginning of stories. Let us visit the Greeks.

Really now, after all, they started it.

 

* * *

 

_Crete_

_A few thousand years ago_

 

“Take this.”

“What is it?” Theseus had looked at the item, the spun-up carmine-dyed twine, questioning. The red-haired woman frowned, impatient. Her hair the color of vases, of Attic red-clay pottery. He had looked then at Ariadne and back again to the dark door of the stone maze, full of consideration.

“A ball of thread.”

“I mean, what’s it for?”

“Map where you’ve been, find your way back.”

“Why is it red?”

“Look, it’s the only one I’ve got.”

This is the first of all labyrinths. We first know of it beginning with stories, beginning with coins minted as early as 430 B.C.E. It was built to hide things, to trap a monster inside. King Minos and his greatest shame, the Minotaur, that monstrous half-man, half-bull creature born of his wife’s grotesque infidelity. Minos had gotten trashed on good Athenian wine, imported from across a short sea, had leaned to his greatest inventor Daedalus and said _boy, do I have a job for you._ (Later, Minos would take more than wine from Athens. Still angry over the death of his son, he’d take their children too.)

Why didn’t they just kill the Minotaur?

I don’t know, that’s not in the story. Pay attention.

So Theseus took the ball of thread and went through into the dark. What is in the center of the labyrinth? What light penetrates there, around sharp corners and false leads? Nothing, nothing, and never. Careful what you look for; careful what you might find.

 

* * *

 

_Hogwarts_

_Now (Approximately)  
August 1998_

 

“Don’t eat anything there.”

“Do I look like a fool to you?”

“Just be careful, Severus,” Minerva says, frowning. She pours a bit of the water from the pitcher, wets a cloth. Places it on a clammy forehead. The cloths do nothing, but it makes them feel like they are doing something, so they keep at it all the same. Dip, wring, pat. Repeat. Severus at the window. The collar of his shirt presses at his throat. He swallows once. Swallows again.

 _I do not need to be goddamn told like a child._ The old stories have warned everyone, wizarding and Muggle alike, to never touch the food of the world of the dead. _Well, the half-dead anyway._ Black-hole eyes on the boy in the white sheets. Harry Potter laid out like a stain, like an oil spill on the pale hospital bed. Unmoving and preternaturally still, save for the occasional wince, save for the furrow of his brow. His hair like a crushed spider on the pillow. The smell of bleach. It always makes Severus sick, this smell of hospitals. Antiseptic. Bandages and insulin, plastic and stainless steel. The bruised plum of Potter’s face. A sunset on his zygomatic arch, mottled peaches at the supraorbital ridge. Reds and purples, his damaged and bleeding face. Led to the slaughterhouse. _You stupid lamb._ Severus and his locked jaw, clicking. Severus and his grinding teeth. Minerva and her wet cloths. (Severus does not unfold his arms, does not dare come closer than his shadow by the door, glaring at dust, scowling at a stained glass window.)

It is three months after the Battle. Potter is getting worse.

Dip, wring, pat. Repeat. A drop of water runs down the boy’s heart-shaped face, across the jaw, behind the ear, down the neck. _He’s skinny as a polecat. What were you eating out in those woods?_ (He remembers the woods, the black intervals of tree trunks, terror and a pond. A Patronus shot into the sky. _Run run run_.)

It shouldn’t have been Potter. That’s not how the stories go. No, the hero lives and the two-faced spitstorm is supposed to die. Reality, as always, fucking things up yet again. He should have died. (They all know this, no one has made plans for Severus after.) His fingers rest on the gash at his throat, knit up now into a silvery, flat scar. Magic and its limitations. It can heal the skin back up, but no magic can make a wound like this, necrotic snakebite, never have been. Still, it is Potter in the hospital bed, Potter with the heart monitor, Potter and his oxygen levels. It should have been Severus. He should not have woken up on the floor of the Shrieking Shack covered in blood, his own worn-out plasma, with a torn shirt tied around his neck, pressing into the wound, with Potter’s hemorrhage-staunching magic still pulsing at his throat. He should not have stumbled, the taste of copper in his mouth, to the door, tripped across this accursed boy, this wretched, awful (beautiful) thing. By any rights, he should not have had the strength to gather the unconscious, bruised body up, up into his grasping arms and stumble like a fool back to the very gates of the battle. The gates of hell. He hadn’t made it past the doors, had fallen on the gravel path up to the portcullis, the bandage slipping. (More blood then, more blood always.) _You stupid, stupid child._

_“He’s stabilizing.”_

_“Why isn’t he waking up?”_

_“There’s something in him, it’s holding him back.”_

Yes, something in the mind. Like an anchor, like a poison. What is it? They’re not sure (he has a sick suspicion). Who else can penetrate the mind? An accomplished Legilimens is necessary (Severus is the best there is). Fold the skinny arms over the rail-thin frame, body like a broomstick.

_“Severus, you’re the best we’ve got.”_

_“I’m not going in the brat’s mind.”_

_“He’ll die.”_

_“So let him.”_ (How many times has he yelled that he would not do something? Wrong again, all along, Severus Snape.) He’d lost the argument, so here he is instead, sitting in a chair in the Hospital Wing, watching Potter’s chest rise and fall.

“Watch your step,” Minerva murmurs.

“I _know_ what I’m doing.”

“It’s Potter, Severus. Nothing is normal where _that_ boy is concerned.”

Watch your step. What absurdity. He sits ramrod-straight in the wood chair. There’s a glass of water at the side. It’s a pointless gesture, this type of Legilimency-diving does not afford glimpses of the surface. Once you get too deep beneath the waves, you cannot see the shore. He swallows, runs his fingertips over the woodgrain of the chair’s arms. Of all the miserable ironies of his life. He’s spent years wishing to get rid of Potter. Now, it’s his repellent lot in life to go in, to bring him back.

“Are you ready?”

“Shut up, give me his hand.”

Warm, strangely pliant. (When was the last time he had held a hand?) The hover of magic at the fingertips, the slight ebb and swell with each heartbeat. A push of gold, Potter has always been gold. When Severus squints, Potter has a trail of gold left behind. The gold in his hands now, this idiot savant. _They were ready to let you fucking die, Potter, didn’t you ever fucking understand that?_

Potter’s hand is smooth.

“Now,” Minerva says. Cast it, cast it, cast it. _Legilimens._

 _Dive._ What comes first? The human diving impulse is the same in deep Legilimency. A rush of coolness to the face, the inability to breathe. Deep divers must remind themselves that they have their tanks of oxygen, that they are an exception to the rule. The trick is to keep breathing. He knows where he is going, that the bottom is his goal. He ignores the colors of the top layers. Surface thoughts, simple images. Further, further down. How many feet? How many fathoms? Go to the blackness of the deep bottom, the graveyard of shipwrecks. Down, down, further down.

_Don’t look back._

 

* * *

 

_I forgot to ask her to water the blasted plant._

He had taken in a little orchid. It had sat forgotten on a desk in the Slytherin common room. He doesn’t know whom it had belonged to but he had watched it dry out, left to wither, forgotten. Its owner likely one of the many war dead. Just a miserable, unimpressive thing. A long stem, supported by a stick. Tightly wound roots in dry soil, a sickly white flower. He should have thrown it away, but instead had put it on the shelf across the room. He waters it occasionally when the soil runs dry. Orchids cannot be placed in direct sunlight. They are creatures of the rainforest, grown far below the canopy in the relative darkness where light happens to pierce. They grow greedily on the trunks of trees, the backs of other plants. Their long, spidery, curling, _grasping_ roots hoping for rain.

Severus doesn’t like to be in direct sunlight either. His bed is angled away from the window. After awhile, he had moved the orchid to his bedroom, in the diffused grey light. Like all flowers, in a curious imitation of ourselves, the petals eventually turn toward the sun.

It is strange, as he descends, that he thinks only of water.

 

* * *

 

He lands on his feet, yellow dust on his oil-black boots. Scowl, look around.

First, there is a market. Built of sand and stone below an identical sky. Sky the color of tornado season. Danger, danger. Like wheat fields blowing in the wind before a wildfire.

The market is loud, a cacophony of noises and noisome smells. Sweat and metal, the sweetness of ripe peaches, sand again. Dust always. Goblins at the stalls, piling the fruit high, operating the tills. The metal sound of coins. It is too much, he grits his teeth. His greasy hair hangs limp over his ears, drowning out the world. The stalls of the fruitsellers and the butchers ring about a larger structure, some two or three stories high. It is covered in frescos that he does not recognize. A wineseller waves a bottle under his rather-noticeable nose, chattering on about the bouquet. Severus waves him away like a gnat.

“Finest, best, most wonderful fruit!” The sellers and their wares. He spies a blue ribbon on a fat pig. The stall there smelling of hay and shit. A bit of mud. The goblins do not look, exactly, like those above ground. They’re smaller and more gnarled, branches grow out of their faces, their skin, their fingers. Their cries ring out in the dusty stalls, birds scatter overhead at the sound.

“Apples and quinces, lemons and oranges, cherries, melons and raspberries, come buy!” _Come buy, come buy._ Severus is no fool, he was not born yesterday (although time moves differently here; perhaps, strangely, he was). If you pass into another realm, never eat their food. It moves into you like a virus, replicating infinitely. It warps your very cells, the replication of your DNA, ties you down to the greedy world like a miserable fly caught in a spider’s web. No, do not buy the food, do not bring it to your mouth.

“Come buy!” A goblin tries to take his hand, guide it to a stall of tomatoes and nectarines. He snatches it away. The goblin shrugs, goes back to gassing fairies. Severus scowls at them all, goblins and fairies both.

“Where is he?”

“There, there!” A wizened hand points to the fortress on a hill. Severus does not remember seeing it before, though it looms distantly and sharp. A long maze covers the long miles across. Curving and twisting dark corridors, built of sand-colored stone. Hungry birds circle over the long interval of the labyrinth, the lost dead are easy pickings. He grimaces. Labyrinths are ancient. They have always held horrors and treasures, nothing ever in between. Built to hold the Minotaur, who had known every path of the labyrinth, every edge, who did not leave, content in his horror. King of the labyrinth (king of dirt; king of nothing).

“That isn’t that far.” (Who are you trying to convince, Severus?)

“It’s further than you think,” the goblin hisses. His face a wrinkle, his nose a red bulb. “That labyrinth goes on for thousands of miles.” Severus glowers, studying the impassive wall before him. _What do they mean, labyrinth? There aren’t any bloody turns or corners. It just goes on and on._

“Well then, tell me, how do I get into the blasted thing?”

“The door, of course. It’s right there in front of you.”

“Don’t be absurd, it is not.” He looks back and forth along the wall, there is no way forward. He can move to the east or to the west. Never forward. The stone wall seems to trail off into eternity, cut off only by the horizon. _Left or right? They both look the same._

“There’s an opening right across from you.”

“No, there is fucking well not.”

“Well, look at it.”

“I _am_ looking, you complete buffoon.”

“Just try it.”

He touches the wall, it begins to shift way beneath his fingers. There’s the magic. Not within him (strange emptiness) but without. The bricks remake themselves into an opening. He thinks of the back room of The Leaky Cauldron, the passage into Diagon Alley. He passes through, the bricks sealing up as he goes, as if they had never moved. Even the dust stayed put. His fingers touch the wall. He should be used to it by now, he trades in magical things. Still, surprise can lurk in strange places.

“Severus?”

He turns back around. There had been nothing there before but now there is an oasis. A woman at a pond, carding a net through the water. She stands in the reeds. Too familiar, this heart-shaped face, these long hands. _Lily._ He is chilled, horror looms in his chest, in his breath. Hair like copper, skin like milk. Arrested at twenty. She is so much younger than him now. No lines crease her face. Had they ever been that young? Her pale moon face, her long neck, her red hair wrapped in plaits above her head. It is a strange hurt to see her, striking red against a bluebird sky.

“Severus?” Lily Evans Potter, still twenty, no green light in her now. She says his name the way she always has, with crisp enunciation, three distinct syllables. He wonders if her son would say it the same way, if Harry Potter would say it the same way. He knows how _Snape_ rolls off Potter’s tongue. Not _Severus._ She walks toward him, picking her rainbooted feet up through the bogmarsh pond. The smell of sphagnum moss, of alkaline and still water, of peat. He thinks of the dead druids in Ireland, preserved in their bogs. The peat in his Scotch. She leans against the little tree at the edge, a Chinese elm, peeling her boots off. Pulling on her regular shoes. She has a netted bag that hits against her pale shins, filled with picked mushrooms. Dirt dries on her leg where it lands.

“What infernal trick is this?” _There are no rules here, you know this._ He cannot expect the rules of the living here, in these deep waters. She shrugs.

“It’s his mind,” she says, shrugging her slim shoulders. “We don’t make the rules.”

“What a _pleasure_ ,” he bites at it like a hand stuck in his mouth. “Where is he?”

“In the castle,” she says. “He’s been here for a long time.”

“It’s only been three months.”

“Not here,” a shaking head. “It’s been a year. He’s locked himself away.”

“It’s the Dark Lord, isn’t it? Keeping him there.”

“Not like you think,” she picks through her bag. Hen-of-the-woods, chanterelles, clamshells. Common for potions, common for soup. Long king trumpets and red lobster mushrooms. Late-season morels. “It’s Harry’s castle. This is all his. The king, you know.”

“What the absolute devil are you on about?”

“He’s the Goblin King, king of the Goblin City,” she waves her arm about, indicating the way he had come. The sounds of the market echo from a distance. The clang of coins in pockets, the squealing hog. _“Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, sweet to tongue and sound to eye, come buy, come buy!”_

“King or no, Potter’s coming back with me.”

“You’d better hurry then. You’re running out of time.”

“Of _course_ I bloody am. Why now?”

“A year and a day, that’s all anyone gets as king. How do you think there came to be so many goblins?” _They were all men once._ He thinks of Potter, long-limbed and easy-smiled, transformed into a bark-covered goblin. It should bring him pleasure (it does not). “It’s been a year.”

“How much longer do I have? In this timeline?”

“Thirteen hours.”

“ _Goddammit_.” Thirteen hours. The time constraint rattles around in his head like a rock in his shoe.

“I can show you the way,” Lily offers, pointing to a path through the muck. He is certain that it had not been there before. “You must be careful of the goblins, Severus.”

“Why? What are they?”

“Men who ripped their souls apart.” She looks off, uncomfortable, “The dead now. They will try to make you forget.”

“Why is Potter here? In the first miserable place?”

“The Horcrux.”

“There is one in him then?”

“He is one. It’s part of him. Take that piece away from him. He’s my child, Severus, please. If you do anything, do it for me.”

He frowns. Impossible. “How?”

“You’ll know when you get there.”

“And if I succeed?”

“He’ll wake up. He’ll be free.”

“Will you -?”

“No, Severus,” she says. “I ate something.” He understands, there is nothing to be done. Some laws cannot be argued with. Even Persephone has to obey these laws, immutable and fixed. A couple of pomegranate seeds. Are they really worth it? “Come on then, get a move on. I know the way.” _Take me there, like Ariadne, like Beatrice. Lily._ A cautioning finger held to careful lips.

He follows her, holding branches out of his face. They pass another market. Severus has never cared for eating, for food. It is a necessity, a task to perform. Scratch off of the list. But now, these grapes piled high on gilded plates are tempting, ripe and fat. There is nothing natural about his desire, forced into him by the rotten, sweet air. “What is this place?”

“A dying mind,” Lily says, “Or what there is left of it. He’s dying, the Horcrux is pulling life from him. So this is also the world of the dead. They’re merging. Eventually, Harry will have no part of it. He’ll just be one of them.”

Severus frowns, looking around at the crumbling bricks, the yellow sky. “This is Potter’s mind?”

“No,” Lily shakes her head, “Not this part, this part belongs to the dead. It gets larger everyday. He only keeps the castle now.” Her long slender fingers graze the walls, the old stones. “The labyrinth is his, he’s trying to protect himself.”

“Are you real?” Black-pupiled frown, glare. His accusing profile. She only smiles; the owls call. Through the labyrinth then, daunting and parched. He thinks of these pitiless tunnels and twists; he thinks of thankless things.

 

* * *

 

Theseus has been walking for hours. He spins his thread, marking his path as he goes. He comes to a door, his long red twine runs across the new corridor. He has accidentally doubled back again.

The worst part of the labyrinth is the darkness. In the darkness, you can think too much. In the darkness, you only have yourself to keep company with. Just you and your memory, a litany of your own mistakes. As Theseus winds his way through the dark, going by feel, by the sound of water dripping into cold puddles, he thinks of the time he had tripped and spilled an entire tray of wine on a visiting dignitary. He thinks of the foolishness of insisting on coming to Crete, his brash boast against the Minotaur. Here he is, holding the ball of red twine that a beautiful woman had put in his hands, saying _please come back to me._

He had been so busy making plans, he hadn’t expected to fall in love. Go on then, terror in his mouth like a poisoned apple, afraid of reaching the center.

It’s his own fault. He’d signed up for this. Someone has to do the dirty work (he’s always had strong hands).

He wipes the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. Dip, wring, pat, repeat.

 

* * *

 

They press on. The labyrinth shifts from tall, commanding walls to piles of broken stone and rubble. Even in its destruction, it is strangely impassible. They keep at the paths, sometimes laid stone, sometimes dry grass. Often dirt. Constant choices. Left or right? Forward or back again? He sinks his teeth into his cheek, unsure if they are going the right way. Is there more than one way to go? There are two kinds of mazes, unicursal and multicursal. Single-pathed or many-pathed. If he could fly, rise above, he could see the lay of the land. That is not how men must press on though, we can never know the layout of paths.

His feet hurt. Lily holds the lantern, tossing salt at goblins and biting fairies. _Get, get, get out of our way._ It is a curious thing. He had forgotten so much of her and yet, now, he thinks only of the boy at the center of the maze. When a debased, brown-watered stream meanders through, he rests on a pile of forgotten bricks nearby, rubbing his sore instep.

“What a positively _delightful_ way to spend one’s twilight days.” He had been young once, had dreamt once. _I wish you hadn’t seen me like this. A wreck. Wrinkled, pathetic. Ravaged._

“You have time,” Lily says, raising her brows, frowning. Her lion’s mane of hair in her face. “You’re only thirty-eight, Severus. That’s not so old.” He grunts. _Time._ What is time without beauty, without hope? The future had been different then, age sixteen, stretching out into the nothing of space like an ocean. He had been unmarred, if already cruel. His cruelty had been a promise then, an interesting life, an interesting ending. Now, he is almost done with the book, he has written most of the story. It is dull, dull and _pathetic._ A ruin, subpar. He does not want to show it to her. (She will never write her own book.)

 _I loved you once. (Didn’t I? How did I love you without knowing your favorite color, if you spear your peas one at a time?)_ He wonders about love. The varietals of love. _I could have loved you._ (It is unfair that Harry Potter should prove him wrong, that Potter would dare to play Quidditch with a sheen of sweat on his brow, would lean back in class and stretch like a cat. His shirt riding up that pale, sunless stomach. Would dare to lick Fortescue’s ice cream from a spoon. He has tried to burn out desire, ignore the physical. His body and his mind, old enemies. If he never feeds his want, shouldn’t it wither? It does not. No, wrong again.)

We don’t get to choose. If he could have chosen, it would not be this. A poisoned hero, barely eighteen. If Potter survives, he will have wreaths and statues, parades and glory. If he could have chosen, he would have burnt this awful _otherness_ out of himself. (Age sixteen, fuming, looking too long at the Quidditch pitch, flat chests shining in communal showers. The other boys teasing, laughing, _do you think queers jerk off whilst looking in the mirror?_ ) No, he had been so desperate. Ignore it, like any fire, it will die if given no air. Looking at the television set, his father in his drunken cups, jeering at the rainbow. Severus glares at the cacophony of _his people_ , He has no color; he is nothing like them.

“Get up,” Lily says, “Buck up, Severus. Pick up your long trail of darkness and get moving.” He grimaces, _yes, Severus, stop your bellyaching._ He knows that there is no joy in his presence. Other people light up rooms, their names written in happiness on other tongues. Not Severus, never Severus. What does he get? The clench of a jaw, a sigh, rolled eyes.

They walk past long groves of trees. Evergreen cypress and slender-branched pink tamarisk. He is more familiar with the broad-leaved oaks and chestnuts. He hugs their shade. Occasionally, he reaches a hand deeper, past the tree trunks, feeling for the familiar old labyrinth wall. It is there, steady as a drum. An ivy-choked temple looms at a fork. The steps covered in mud and sun-facing weeds. Curvy faience statues loom impassively, offering their carved snakes to passersby.

“You can’t love someone you don’t know,” she says.

“I knew you.”

“Did you?” She steps over a log, “Or did you make it up? Is that why I’m so hard to remember now?”

“Would it have been different if - ?”

“Maybe,” she says, “But I can’t tell you if it would have been better.”

There comes a point in life when time is the cruelest master. It happens slowly, gradually. Waking up one day and realizing that there is a generation younger, that others are starting their own stories, that you’re halfway into your own book and cannot turn back. Time travel is never something we have mastered. The Time Turners are awkward and limited, only offering brief jumps into the past. We never talk about jumping forward, into that bright unknown of the future. No, we are terrified of the future, of the ends of the story. We don’t own the future, that is for other men. The unborn. No, we are obsessed with the past. Changing it, reliving it. Those same few chapters, over and over and over again.

“I’m not here to be just a fixture in your story, Severus.” Severus and his damn pedestals. He wants to run away. Italy is nice at this time of year. Build a little raft of balsawood, sail it to the Americas. No one would ever hear the name _Severus Snape_ again. “What is he like? Harry. Tell me about him.” _Not him again._ Not Potter, never Potter. He is never far from Severus’ mind. How can you ignore the electricity in your skin, the crackle in your fingertips? His stomach is a thunderstorm. Potter and his focused, too-long stares. They do not mean anything, they cannot mean anything. Potter, the hero. (Heroes are never bearers of _otherness._ Potter and his sickening perfection. Yes, yes, grow up, child. Marry a witch, have your clutch of children.)

He arches a brow, “I’m a poor choice to ask. There is no love lost between Potter and me.”

“You’re the only one I _can_ ask.”

A swallow. What is that in his throat? “He is -“ _Strangely powerful, irritatingly brash. He has all that foolish courage of his parents. He’s quick to anger (like me); he’s quick to forgive (unlike me). He looks sad sometimes._ It is an odd thing to have the words inside you, choking up your throat, unable to spit them out. If Severus had been born to salt flats and shipwrecks; if Severus had been born to a low-tide that marooned sailors, then Harry had been born to trees. That deep forest, dark and wanting. He doesn’t know what is in there.

He narrows his eyes against the sun and its glare. The bone-dry, desiccated air. “He is young,” Severus finally offers.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“What else do you want from me? The boy’s been a bloody terror for seven goddamn years. He could light up all of Edinburgh’s electrical grid with his latent power and still won’t crack a textbook to save his life. And it is about _saving his life,_ though he has never seemed to _notice._ No, let the others pick up the pieces, throw themselves on the goddamn rack.”

“He’s eighteen, Severus.”

 _All the worse._ Instead, he thinks of the rock in his boot, the sound of crows overhead. The sun bearing down on his scalp, drawing out sticky sweat. The labyrinth rolls over the coming hills, on into the distance, past gnarled trees and barrow-hills. Grain rots in the fields. Is there an end? _Even if you get to the center, you’ll never get out again._

 

* * *

 

He trips.

A sharp cry, a plunge to black in a frenzy of violent terror. They have fallen. He had caught his boot on a rock, stumbling into a pit. Lily had been surefooted but he fails them both, crashing into her back, taking her down with him.

“ _Fuck,_ ” she breathes, wiping the hair from her eyes. “Where are we?”

He looks around, trying to see in the bleak darkness. The lantern has shattered against the stone floor in the fall, they will find the glass with their hands. It is at least eight feet down. He aches for magic. A simple _lumos_ would go so far. Still, the smell and the feel of the stone beneath his fingers tell him what he needs to know. “This is an oubliette.” He touches his hand to his forehead, comes away sticky with blood. Scrapes and pains.

An oubliette. A place to forget someone. The French and their inventions. It sounds better in English, you don’t realize the gutting truth. Oubliette comes from _oublier,_ to forget. Yes, this stone pocket. They grab you by the arms, toss you in from the hatch, the angstloch, in the ceiling. You fall beneath. Our deepest terrors are the dark and the deep, being forgotten. This is all of them at once.

He has been here before. Not exactly here, no, but something like this. How had it been? They had all been the same, the lot of them. Water dripping on the walls, the floor. Stone and mold. Rattling teeth. Rattling rats. The prisoners rattling in their cages. He had thrown them there, dropped them in. Sometimes he had given them water, sometimes food. Food is the cruelest, it keeps them alive longer, awaiting the inevitable end. _“Severus, my good executioner,”_ Riddle and his foul breath; Voldemort and his rotten teeth. He keeps his face still when they die, the wretched things. (At least it is finally over for them, at least they are finally at peace.)

It reminds him of lobsters. He remembers the cook at the local dive, where his parents had taken him as a boy. The lobsters in their little tanks. _“Look mama,”_ he had said, pointing. She had told him to pick one out, they’d have it for supper. Cokeworth, flung out on the shoreline, proud of their oysters, their lobsters, their patch of sand.

“Supper? To _kill_ them?”

“That’s what they’re for, Severus,” his mother had snapped, always impatient with his questions. He had considered it the greatest betrayal. Had eyed his mother and all cooks with suspicion. _Lobster murderers._ Later, when he learns about cooking, about feeding himself, he discovers shades of grey. We must eat, the lobster must die. The cook knows it’s not personal. He has two ways to do it. The first is to shove a knife through its head, straight down the middle. Clean and quick. The other is to boil it, to drop it into a screaming pot of water, turn it bright screaming red. He learns that the knife is the kinder way, that if you are quick and sure with a knife, the lobster will never know that the deed is coming, that the end is nigh.

Severus, Riddle’s executioner. Do you understand now? He is quick and sure with a knife, with a wand. Macnair would pick the pot, drag out the moment. Not Severus. He makes it fast. If they must die, it will be clean. He understands cooks now. Stuck in his own miserable oubliette waiting to be either picked out of the cage, executed, a knife through the head, or forgotten and left to rot. _Neither is a particularly desirable outcome._ It is easy to forgive him, Severus Snape, murderer, if you do not know his crimes. He shakes and yells them from towers, he makes sure _no one_ forgets. _Know me, know what I have done._

Stones like earth, stolen from quarries. He leans against the wall, his fingers dissatisfied. He has found no give in the rock.

“We might be stuck here until he wakes up,” Lily says. She peers up at the opening above them, their single shaft of light.

“If he wakes up -“

“When.”

“ _If._ ” (There is no certainty for Severus Snape. There never has been, there never will be. He only trades in _ifs_ and _maybes._ ) “Will he remember this? My _regrettable_ presence here?”

“I don’t know,” Lily says, “I think he will if he wants to.” _He will remember nothing._ Severus grunts. He sits against the wall, the cool dirt floor beneath him, the damp through his woolen trousers.

“It’s always just my bloody luck that the task falls to me to save the foolish boy _once again._ ”

“Luck, Severus?” Lily says, smiling, “Is that why you’re here?” There is a danger to the broaching of the truth. We can go two ways once confronted. The gracious will laugh, acknowledge, weave the truth into their being. The crueler, the meaner, the base of us will snap our teeth like wolves, deny it outright, try to burn it out at the root. (Severus gets the kindling.) _Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?_ (Severus, nineteen years old, bitter and snarling. His mother gone, his father gone. His forearm burning. He still has his days to fill, laying there like a greasestain on his bed, _The Wall_ on the record player.)

Yes, it is easy to love the dead. Lily will never ask anything of him. He has never dreamt of a woman naked. He’s seen one once. How had it gone? He had been twenty-three years old. Macnair had smelled something wrong about him, sniffed it right up. _“You’re one of those queers, ain’t you?”_ Severus had pulled out a knife, threatened to gut him from groin to neck and back again. Still, Macnair hadn’t let it slide. Severus had gone along to the whorehouse with him. In the room, alone with the unlucky woman, he’d threatened her at wandpoint. Aimed a curse right at her curls and her lipstick. _“Swear on your life when they ask you or I’ll kill you, I will.”_ Desperate. He didn’t hurt her. She had sworn that they’d fucked like rabbits. Macnair and his suspicion, drunk as hell, smelling of whatever swill they had to offer, had let it slide. (Severus had got back, back to his godforsaken house, still with pictures of his mother and father on the grey walls, the same dust in the same pockets, had thrown up in the sink.)

A long time has passed. No one asks questions these days. _No one can blame me for walking away._

Their fingers fumble along the black walls. He remembers the last few unlucky he had imprisoned for Riddle. They had watched weeds grow up in the cracks in the stone, had collected the damp moisture from the walls, from the floor. Cultivated their little gardens of moss, lichen. Some had kept spiders as pets, feeding them the dead flies who had got in, who had never found their unlucky ways back out.

“Ah there,” Lily says, her voice bodiless from a black corner.

“What now?”

“There’s a hidden door.”

“You knew it was there all along, didn’t you?” Arch an eyebrow, pointed as the top of a church window.

“Don’t be so suspicious, Severus,” Lily huffs, “We’re not all out to get you.”

Through the tunnel then, out of the dark oubliette. They find their way by field into an alley. He blinks in the light, staring into an orchard beyond.

 

* * *

 

Theseus has heard much of the Minotaur. His teeth, sharp and ragged as rocks, made to grind down human bone. His blood like acid, burning through skin, burning at a touch. His horns, made to dash against and gore. To punch through a stomach, a side of flesh. Long pig, yes, the Minotaur and his taste for half of himself. Human flesh.

(Stranger still, the other rumors. The Minotaur likes to sleep in. He was born under a night sky but there is no open ceiling in the labyrinth, so he misses the stars. He is pale, he has not seen the sun in years. He has a name. Theseus considers this strange fact, the name of a monster. You should not name monsters, not name evil things. It makes them real. Gives them little truths. The Minotaur is named Asterion, which had also been the name of King Minos’ foster-father. A name that had been given to the baby half-bull, held in his mother’s arms beneath a starry sky.)

Don’t think about the nuances of monsters. Complicated things loom at their edges. If you stare too deeply at black, it all shifts to grey.

 

* * *

 

“God, what is this foul smell?” It reminds him of Cokeworth. Of the crawlspace below the floorboards. Animal dung in the fields. Rotten meat. Termites, that strange smell of mold in the wood. Stagnum. Lacrustine. The path has dead-ended at a bog. The still waters and their heavy moss. Even there at the shore, the moisture seeps through the thin spots on Severus’ boots. Bogwater is never beautiful. Never glacier-clear. No, the water in his boots is brown as muck, painted with ochre-colored peat tannins.

“This is the bog,” Lily says, “It shouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, _obviously,_ ” he mutters. The sick scent wafts higher, caught in his breathing. In his nose. She skirts the edge hesitantly. He puts his boots in the muck. Dead things lie under the water. He can see their rotted hands, their decomposing arms.

Moving through the land of the dead, guided by a dead hand. We neglect the dead, claim terror. We are not afraid of them, not really. We walk on their graves, grind up their bones. We eat their flesh, breathe the air they exhaled. They rot underground, decompose, feed the trees and the grass that we lie beneath. We are terrified of our own mortality, not theirs.

“Don’t step in that!”

“What are you on about?” He looks back at the shore, stares at her. The woman. What is her name? He had known once. She had been important once. Why?

“Do you know where we are, Severus?” She pushes him back from the edge of the wetland, away from the fumes. The heavy stink. He breathes harshly of clearer air. “Focus. God, I warned you they’d try to make you forget. _Do you know who I am_?”

 _Who are you?_ It skirts the edge of his memory. He tries to pull it back, wind up the fishing rod. He’s caught a big one. How does he know about fishing? Maybe he is a fisherman. Yes, that would make sense. He runs through an index of fish in his mind. He knows the carp, the mackerel. Cod and haddock, plaice and sole. The fishmonger’s cry, _come buy, come buy!_ He knows knots. Vinyl rope. How to measure the speed of wind, the height of waves. Maybe he is a fisherman.

She waves the air away from his face, pulling him further back from the bog. The heavy stench. “Try to remember.” _What have I forgotten?_ (That’s the problem with forgetting. You don’t know what to look for when it’s gone.)

Yes, consider memory. They come like bubbles of air from a drowning man. He pops the first one.

 

* * *

 

The first memory.

One of his tasks had been to prepare meals for old Riddle. He had preferred rats. Severus had caught them, sometimes with spells, sometimes with traps. Voldemort preferred those caught with non-magical means. _It makes them taste strange,_ he had said. (Magic is too quick, he likes the taste of fear.) He brings the platter of cooked, shaved rats to the cruel-grinned wizard. “Do you want a napkin?”

“No,” Riddle bites down. No, Severus knew, he will open his jaw like a viper and swallow the bits whole. Tom had liked Severus. He liked the way Severus hates him, the way his spine curves back when Tom is close. When Severus had to carve the rat meat, early on, Tom liked to lean close, savoring the way Severus’ nostrils flared, the way his lip curled in obvious loathing. Tom liked that. It made him hungry, these strange appetizers. How had Severus gotten the job of rat catcher? The man before him, Albert Geller, had died while setting fire to a Muggle house. Had tripped on a pile of rocks, face down into flames.

“Why isn’t Geller serving?” Voldemort had asked.

“Died on a hunt, My Lord,” Severus had said, pulling the joints apart, separating white meat from dark.

“Very commendable,” Riddle nodded, “Very commendable.”

After, Severus wiped the table with the unused napkins. Dipped in water and dish soap where the juices had dried down into the woodgrain. Dip, wring, pat, repeat.

 

* * *

 

What is the next surfacing of memory?

A girl and a boy sitting on a park bench. They might have been friends.

“Look,” she had said, had touched his hand, “The sunrise.” His stomach warmed suddenly. She had stared at the horizon, their twinned awareness concentrated on the brief contact. He had thought of beauty, of his mother and her affair with Dostoevsky, her harsh dystopias and bronze sculptors. _The Gates of Hell._ Lily was beautiful, he knew that. Gentle. His palms had grown slick with sweat. An oval face and antique photographs, two-quid supermarket posters of Audrey Hepburn. She wore _L’air du temps_ and lace skirts that left marks on his skin when he had held her too tight. He had looked at her, staring at the blood sky, had hid his bitten fingernails in the palm of his sallow hand.

He realizes there is a difference between these loves. One is about him; one is not.

Lily, her name was Lily. Hair like Grecian pottery. Yes.

They might have been friends.

 

* * *

 

The last memory. A boy. Who is he?

Blackhaired, stars in his eyes. The Polaris of a sunless sky. Yes, yes, he is following this one like a reluctant magnet. Why had it happened? (Do we ever know?) He has always had a weakness for impetuous bravery, for wells of empathy, laughter. We fill in the gaps in ourselves. The strongest structures intersect. We give our too much to the empty, trade our weights.

The boy laughs. He is a flyer. This old maybe-fisherman watches him from sea level. The boy with a broomstick in his hand, doing cartwheels in the sky. His fish heart fills up with too much. His hands twitch in reflection of the boy’s exuberance. He wants to peel the creature out of the air, pull him close. _Let me kiss you._ Yes, he knows what he wants.

He is in love. Ah, yes, that makes sense. It explains everything. He is a maybe-fisherman so he understands the way a ship loves the sea, a monkfish loves the ocean. He loves this boy. It feels natural. The boy’s face surfaces in his memory, green-eyed and fineboned, drifting to the top of the water like a drowned thing. He is in love, yes, yes, it is like being given the key to the code. He sifts through what comes of their history, through his story, old words and actions in light of his new awareness. He has been in love for so long, it explains Severus to himself. Love, silent as a cancer, creeping up on us when we’re not looking. It aches like a wound, like it's lodged in the bone. He is growing spongey where he has been brittle. (After we have held firm, every measure of give feels like collapse.)

What is the boy’s name? _Who are you?_ (He’s forgotten so much. The day has grown so long while he played outside. Is it time to go in? Why would he choose to play here, this noxious bog? Did he miss dinner? His father will be furious. He won’t get anything tonight.)

Then, the bubble pops.

_Harry._

 

* * *

 

“Why are you here, Severus?”

“I don’t know.”

“ _Remember._ ”

He focuses. He remembers the boy; he remembers seven years of trying to drill Potions concepts into him. “Harry Potter.” _Yes yes Potter. Potter, Potter, burning bright._ “It’s your wretched brat I’m after.”

“If it hadn’t - “ _What if it had gone another way?_

“I don’t know, Severus.” She looks at him curiously. “What did you remember?”

“Snakes,” he mutters.

She breaks a stick off from a nearby tree, nodding. Breaks it down into smaller pieces, throws the dry wood away. “Why did you join him?”

He has answers. They sit ready in his mouth. None of them matter. He had joined up, bit bitter, bit angry. The swell in his chest at the crest of the sound of Riddle promising _power,_ promising _respect._ He’d been homesick from the beginning. He had missed his mother. The sight of the lake from his bedroom window. The smell of Hogwarts on that first day of September term. Fresh parchment and iron-gall ink. He was tired of plucking rats even on the first day. Why did he join him? Have you ever burnt something just because you could? Tossed a newspaper in the fire, a stick, a bottle. See what happens. Severus had wanted to burn things. Riddle had offered a match. Severus doesn’t know how to say, _I’m from Cokeworth. The air is yellow and the river is polluted with coaldust. The streets smell like piss and vinegar. Like trash, that awful mixed stench of sour milk and pickle juice, coffee grounds and nappies. Our patches had patches. My father and his fist, his sweat and hairy knuckles. It never mattered who was in power, all misery is the same. This one said he’d give me a job knocking teeth out, so I went._

He looks back, Lily offers a nothing smile. Her hair like fireworks, her mouth like a funeral dirge. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ He wonders who she might have been. Lily Evans, who had a knack for Charms, who was fond of gardening, who papered her bedroom with pictures of Harrison Ford. They had had their dreams once, age seventeen. The world had been so obvious, laid out in black and white. Right and wrong, good and bad. (Later, much later, does Severus understand grey.)

He says nothing. “Do you remember that day?” she asks. He does. What had she said to him then?

_“Good God, Severus, what happened to your face?”_

He had glared, quiet and spiny. He had wanted to lash out, to say something deviantly clever. Hurt her. Lily, wearing James Potter’s promise ring. The red marks on Severus’ face, the lashes from a drunk man. The ink still stings on his arm. He knows he’s made a mistake (he is not ready to admit it). He and his foul pride.

 _“Did you have a good time in Cornwall?”_ Ash and lemon juice in his voice. His usual catastrophes.

 _“Severus, look at me. Don’t be an arsehole.”_ His dark sleeve riding up, the ink still sore. “ _My god, what have you done?”_

“I wasn’t yours to be angry about,” she says. He grunts. He knows. It hadn’t been that. Not really, though it had been an easy story later. What was it about? He had been screaming and no one had listened. He’s always had a tornado’s touch. It starts in his legs, the restless bounce. In his fingers, tapping along the edge of something. You can see it in cats, it starts in the flick of a bored tail. It races up the main nerve, the vagus nerve, up the spine to his brain. He can’t control it, though he tries more now. Don’t set yourself on fire just to keep yourself busy.

“It wasn’t about you.”

“I know,” she says. “Then stop claiming that it was.” He wants a cup of water. He doesn’t know who to ask around here. He thinks of his forgotten breakfast, way back up on the shore, a half-eaten bit of toast. Swallowing your pride is hungry work; there is nothing here to eat.

 

* * *

“Bull, bull, come on out, wherever you are.” Theseus has painted his face with a bit of blood from the gash on his leg. His eyes lantern-bright, adjusted to the dim. All darkness is relative. Some creatures see well in the dark, some do not even have eyes. We find ways to fumble through. His blood is thundering, he is aware of his heart. This brave front, _where are you, you big dumb bull,_ thrown up before terror. The Minotaur has never left a man alive. He eats seven Athenian youths a year, uses their bones to pick his teeth clean after.

Are you so sure this was the right choice, Theseus? Be careful where you step.

 

* * *

 

It is darkest in the center of the labyrinth; it is darker where the castle rises above the twisting paths. They have come to the castle finally.

What is a castle? A fortress, always. This is no human architecture, Severus does not recognize the bronze detailing, the non-Euclidian curves. How do you contemplate beyond our dimensions? You cannot conceive of colors that do not exist, imagine then being confronted with them. The castle looms, heavy and wrong. He studies the formidable curtain wall.

 _Where there is a castle, there is a lord. Potter is in there._ Harry Potter, the Goblin King. King and prisoner simultaneously. He scowls at the dirt path. At the yellow, lark-vomit sky. Look around at this scorched earth. This nothing. This bleak panorama. Arid, vast, featureless but for the forbidding castle. It rises starkly from a rocky landscape. Nothing green grows here, close to the castle. Nothing on this lonely moorland. His memory sharpens as the bog fumes dissipate. Lily stops. “This is as far as I can go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she pauses. “You don’t need me anymore.”

“He won’t trust me.”

“He will,” Lily says. She smiles, reaching for his hand. Her warm fingers in his frozen ones. “You’ve always looked out for him, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” he grunts. _Always._ Always, always. _I will protect him._ Severus has wanted to crawl inside Potter, inside the boy. (Yes, there is a cruder method. He has slipped a hand past his waistband, thought of that too.) This is as close as he can be. Bodiless, like a virus in the mind. Like a white blood cell, a macrophage. The first line of defense in the body’s immune system. Cancer eats the body; a Horcrux eats the mind. Severus holds his dagger in his pocket, a skinny little switchblade, looking for things that should not be. Yes, yes, a macrophage. The word comes from Greek. Big eater. He would swallow up the Horcrux himself if he could, would quiet it away from Potter. Ride it like a bomb somewhere out to detonate safely at sea.

“Tell me.” She looks impish. It is a strange look, he’s more used to it now on her son. “When did you fall for him?”

“I did not do such an _absurd_ thing as to fall for the brat.”

“If you say so.” She lifts her hand. “Goodbye, Severus.” _Goodbye, farewell._ (At least he could say it to her this time, at least this time she is not already cold.) He looks back for a long time as he walks toward the castle, her pale round face fading from view. As the world falls down. It doesn’t matter, goodbyes are for the living. Not the dead. Owls call again, echoing against the blighted curtain wall. Towering. Into the castle then. Into the center.

Careful, Severus, careful of what you might find.

 

* * *

 

Staircases.

Staircases upon staircases, staircases that go to nowhere. Into walls, out of windows. Decay. Unearthly. Weed-choked cracks in the floor. He knows old castles but this is nothing like he had ever seen. It is an odd collection of styles, as if the architect had picked them out from across all the centuries all at once. He can hear his steps echo off the long corridors, echo off the stone masonry. Off of the blind arcades, off of the balustrades. It echoes like the market from before. _Come buy, come buy!_ He presses on. It is a joyless, dreary place.

A bird gets close to his face. A small yellow and white long-tailed shrike. _Lanius schach._ The butcherbird. There’s no hesitation in the thing, it gets right up at him, pecks at his mouth. He swipes at it. Wretched creature.

It is an eerie and empty space. It is oddly cold. The windows are tall and have no glass. The tattered black wool curtains blow in the harsh air. He expects snow, though it had been warm outside. The home of the Goblin King. He wonders what faery overlord Potter reports to. Who enforces the year-and-a-day rule? A mournful bell tolls somewhere. It sounds as if it is everywhere at once. It echoes, like all things do. The castle appears to be empty but there is a skittering at the edges of Severus’ vision, as if something had just darted out of sight.

“Where are you, boy?” _Where am I supposed to go?_ The castle rambles on, it could take weeks. He peeks into rooms. They do not all make sense. Some doors open into walls, some staircases go nowhere. He looks into an empty and cold room and sees nothing but half a large oak tree, which has grown in from the glassless window. Crows nest in it. He backs out, closes the door behind him.

The next room is a ballroom. It doesn’t follow, putting ballrooms on the fifth floor. Like the rest of the castle, the room is a ruin of itself. No lamps are lit, dust is thick across the floor. It smells of must and forgetting.

“Wait,” comes a voice. Severus looks again.

A boy steps from the shadows. Potter as he has never been. This strange underworld plays tricks on Severus. Exaggerates. Potter, his white shirt and pale skin. King of the labyrinth, king of goblins, king of dust. Potter, the Breton, Potter, the Cornish boy. He looks like more of himself. Severus catches himself staring at the unusually fine cheekbones, the pensive expression. The pen-stroke brows. The pomegranate-red mouth. Born in 1980, a Leo. (His mother had never trusted fire signs. _Too much passion_ , she had said. _It’ll burn your heart out._ She had been an earth sign like him. Taurus and Capricorn, little sticks in their patches of mud.)

_Quit staring, you’ll make a fool of yourself._

There he is, pale and lit from within. What is this rush of blood? Severus feels his heartbeat quicken, a wave of hemoglobin and plasma, as if his terror rides on the back of his blood cells. Blood pounding through the endless twists and turns of his veins, his arteries, the old and empty chambers of his heart.

“Snape.”

“Potter.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“To be anywhere but here, _do_ allow me to assure you.”

“Then go.”

“You need to come back.”

“No.”

“Quit having a wallow in your own misery and let everyone else get on with their damn lives. It’s always been all about you, hasn’t it been, Potter?”

“Shut up, Snape, you don’t know the first thing -”

“You foolish, idiotic, useless boy, I know _everything_ -”

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ speak to me like that,” Potter hisses, stepping close, nose to bulbous nose. Severus grabs him by the collar. He’s not elegant in a fight and he’s skinny as a broomstick, yet everyone forgets that he’s a potioneer, that his hands are strong. He pushes his thumbs against Potter’s larynx, wanting to choke the air out of the boy like a balloon. The boy’s left hook gets him right in the flank. Severus stumbles, losing his grip. His stomach still roils from the punch like the sea after a volcano had erupted somewhere, perhaps Krakatoa, way out in a corner. He might throw up, lose what’s left of his meager tomato sandwich. They cleave away from each other, breathing heavily.

Strange word, to cleave. At first blush, it’s nothing unusual. Another verb in a dictionary. There are plenty of verbs, nothing to look at there. But _to cleave_ is a contronym, meaning simultaneously to pull apart, meaning to come together. (All things ache to come back together. In the beginning, before this whole mess, we were compressed down to a single _something._ Then sparks, the Big Bang, the great universe unfolding, matter flying out rapidly into far reaches. What is the story of ourselves save the desperate attempts of little atoms everywhere, trying to put ourselves back together again?)

They cleave back. Potter leans up, gasping. Reaches out for Severus, doubled-over, trying to catch his breath. “You alright?”

“Just absolutely _splendid,_ ” Severus grits, rubbing his side. Potter rolls his eyes, huffs. He snaps his fingers and the pain melts away from Severus. Even the tear in his slacks from the fall into the oubliette has faded into a nothing-that-ever-was. Severus feels his own lack of magic in his fingertips, envious. It’s the downfall of all deep Legilimencers, the constraints of the mind. Magic doesn’t bear forth. You don’t get to take it with you.

Potter barks a short laugh. “I don’t know why I bother anyway. Though I’d love to rough you up for real.”

“Do explain, for the benefit of the class, how getting me in the side isn’t real?”

A strange smile plays on the boy’s mouth. “You know, you even _sound_ like him too. Though I guess my mind _would_ be really good at dreaming him up. Or you up. Not really sure what to call you.”

“Your mind,” he says flatly.

“Well, yeah,” Potter runs a hand through his hair, “Though I figured you’d show up sooner. I was taking bets with the goblins about whether I’d kiss you or kill you if you did. I guess I gotta pay out to the _kill you_ camp.”

His mouth is very, very dry. The world shifts upon its axis, the seasons change. _Kiss you or kill you._ “Despite your best efforts of the past seven years, telling anyone of my demise would be an immense exaggeration.”

The boy laughs. It echoes off the stone. Stone walls, stone floor, stone ceiling. Out the paneless windows, into a sky cold enough for snow. “Dance with me,” Potter says, holding out his hand. Severus considers the splayed fingers. Potter, short-fingered. Potter, rough-fingered. _You and your pondmuck eyes, your moss-irised stare_. The short, clean nails. The wand callus there, right between thumb and index finger. No one has ever held a hand out to Severus Snape without a wand in it, without a warning. Harry Potter, you old hatred, who never really hated him at all.

“Have you _entirely_ lost it?” His ink-dark eyes wide, bleak against the whites of his corneas. _Do you even know who I am right now?_

There’s nothing artful in his eyes. Severus and his moment, standing at the shoreline, studying the depth of the ocean, craving the dive. Preparing to turn away (shoved on in anyway). Potter, paleskinned and treebranch-haired. Potter and his placid normalcy. Just a normal boy in an abnormal life, Potter and his myriad of chances, and his well of empathy. _I said I wouldn’t get sucked in._ Everyone had loved Potter, Severus, always contrary, had hated instead. These little rebellions, centering him, grounding the core. (Everyone loves Potter, now to be contrary, Severus loves him the most.)

Potter’s hand is still extended, that strange smile on his face. Who dances with the Goblin King? Severus looks at the hand. At the lean man offering it. Past, past, in a pile of torn curtains and broken crow feathers, he sees it. Just past Potter, the miserable, skinless creature. Heaving and small, spitting and vile. The Horcrux. He looks back to the outstretched palm. If he dances with Potter, if he says _yes_ , maybe he can get to it. He thinks of the dagger in his pocket, feels the weight against the fabric of his robes. Close the eyes, count to three. _One, two, three._ (He is so tired.) His hand tingles where Potter has touched it, it races up the long vein in his arm, back to the heart in his chest. This racing, pins-and-needles, feeling, as if he has been asleep all this time. It’s time to wake up.

“Dance with me,” Potter says again. The Goblin King and his leaf green eyes. Severus looks at the Horcrux, grits his unfortunate teeth, takes the offered hand. They move awkwardly, though Potter takes the lead. Severus does not know any dances. “Just follow me,” the boy whispers. ( _When have I not?_ ) Potter moves gently, deft with the certainty of those good with rhythm, who can trust their bodies to do as they’re told.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re just talking about dancing. Nothing more.”

“ _Why_ , Potter?”

He shrugs, “I’ve never had much chance for it. Seem to have a standing date with attempts on my life. Never got around to a waltz.”

Severus arches one severe brow, “With me? You must be desperate.”

“I’ve always wanted to with you,” Potter says, shrugging. Severus stares at the other man, Potter and his strangely expressive face. _Is this a trick?_ (He is an old double-crosser, it does not feel like a trick.) _He won’t remember any of this when he wakes up._

“You’re daft.”

Potter laughs. It echoes in the sparse stone room. “Yes,” he murmurs wryly, “You’ve told me.”

“You have to get out of this place.”

“Why should I?”

“You will die if you stay here, you miserable idiot.” _Don’t you dare leave me here._

“I am their king, they won’t hurt me.”

_“You are dying already, Potter.”_

Those mossy eyes and their blackrot lashes, a long and slow blink. “What do you mean?” It’s hard to explain. Potter feels so solid, looks so solid. Severus knows how a Horcrux eats at the body, even if the dying man can’t tell. It is not, entirely, unlike a cancer. If Potter doesn’t come back soon, wake up into the other world of Hogwarts and hospital wings, a clucking and fussing Poppy Pomfrey, then Severus knows the course of the disease. Hair loss and bone loss, skin tight against the skull. Chronic dehydration, bruises everywhere like a banged-up and mottled plum. The Horcrux had settled somewhere in the brain, like a tumor but invisible to the eye. He wonders if they could have gotten it with radiation. Maybe if they had caught it early, before the metastasis had set in. It’s spread everywhere now, claiming all of the boy for its own. Maybe, maybe, if they had gotten it early, they could have cracked Potter’s skull open and gone at his grey matter with a knife or two, a scalpel or a laser. Sewn him back up again, good as new. (No, not this time. This time they try old remedies, going in after Potter as Orpheus had descended.)

“Focus, Potter. Look at the goddamn fruit. _Look at it._ Not at what they want you to see. It’s all rotten, these are all _dead men._ You will _die._ ” _Let me make a deal, we can trade places. Get out of here, you absolute fool._

“Why do you care?”

 _Why, indeed? Why does it matter?_ (It doesn’t matter.)

“Let go,” he murmurs. It is quiet. _Come back, come back, come back._ He thinks of God and the priests. He hasn’t been to church in twenty years. He’s shouted at God, at his son, the clouds in the sky. No one has ever replied. What kind of God is that to not pick up the phone? Who dared to fill him up with all _this_ (sick, passion, ache, want) and give him nothing to grab at, nothing to eat, no one to talk to?

“No,” Harry pulls tighter around him. Severus and his willful body. He has made a critical mistake.

“Give up the creature.” _Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way back to the Goblin City to take back the creature._

“Over my dead body,” Potter says, dreadfully close. Severus can feel the warmth of his skin, his breath. This would never happen outside of this place. No, it is not meant for another castle, another timeline. He stares at the parted mouth. Harry watches him look. Sometimes we know the depths of things before we fall.

“I think,” Severus murmurs, his hands tightening on the infuriating mass of boy in his arms, “that you are _fundamentally_ misunderstanding the idea.”

“Am I?” Potter asks like static electricity, raising the hair on Severus’ arms, spiking up his back.

“The trick of the thing is to keep you alive.”

“Yes,” Potter murmurs, circling closer and closer. A pilot eyeing the landing, an asteroid hurtling to the earth. His new-growth eyes lowered, tongue slicking up his lips. _Please god, please._ In the end, how does it go? Harry presses his mouth to Severus’ own. It aches in his mouth, in his jaw, like biting into too much. He closes his eyes, his breathing panicked, wild, overwhelmed. _I need you, god, you have no idea, I have no idea. This is wrong, I cannot. I will never tell you. Let us have this, yes, just this. A dream. You won’t remember it anyway (I will remember it always). I will never be able to look at you again. Not now, with too much on my tongue. Not now that I know the taste of you. Your spit and your teeth, the pattern of your tastebuds. The sounds you make when you touch me. Please god, don’t let him remember this (let me remember always)._ His hair falls around them like a crow’s wing. Like dismal and tattered wool curtains. Where has he put his hands? They are everywhere, mapping the bones of Harry’s face, the cord muscle of his neck.

 _It is only a dream._ The pulse below his fingertips. He can count the sluggish heartbeat. (Severus’ mind flickers. He has the barest glimpse of the surface. A boy in a hospital bed, barely breathing. _Don’t you dare make me bury you._ )

He kisses away from the boy's mouth. Potter follows him. Yes, this is better than firewhisky, better than port wine. He could drink his fill, forget his name, wake up pissed in the morning. How far could they go? (An image of Potter on the flagstones, laid bare against the cold floor. Worse, yet more, Severus himself laid out on his back like a sacrifice, like a saint to watch for miracles. His hair a dark halo. _Yes yes yes, if you want me, come and take me._ )

The creature of the damned, red and rotten as a fire ant, a clover beetle. It makes a rustling sound in the feathers. Time to pull back. Time to go home. This is not for you, Severus. _You know what you came to do. Do the right thing for once in your miserable, godforsaken life. Give him back his ridiculous life._ “Give it to me, the Horcrux,” Severus hisses into the curl of the boy’s ear. He feels Potter shiver against him. “Or I’ll take the thing anyway. You’re going back, Potter.”

He jerks himself from Potter’s grip, the strong arms vanishing. He misses the warmth. Throws his weight into it, pushing the boy back toward the door. Whirls upon the demonic thing in the strange nest. “You wouldn’t dare,” Potter and his wide eyes, horror on his face. Severus and his dagger. He pulls the little switchblade from his pocket. The Horcrux screams.

Severus flings his body over the red-skinned monster, the little flayed _nothing_ of a skeleton. This final piece of a man who had wanted the world to bend to him, who had taunted Severus for decades. ( _“You were born to torture, weren’t you, Severus? Even your name, aren’t you the severest of all? They all die for you, don’t they?_ ” What had Riddle never realized? They had, with their torn skin and their broken bones, they had all begged for death. A bit of mercy at the end. Severus had let them all die, all as quick as he could. It was the only mercy he’d had left.)“You’re always wrong about me,” Severus barks. He fingers the dagger. It’s a trusty old blade, all good Cokeworth boys keep one in their coat. In their shoe. Severus, the executioner, back to his old tricks. He might as well do what he’s good at.

“He’s _mine.”_

“Don’t let him have _power_ over you,” Severus hisses, “This is what he _wants_ you to think.”

“He’s _part of me._ ”

“Get used to incompleteness, Potter,” he growls, “It’s good enough for the rest of us.”

His stab is quick, clean, sure. (He has had a lot of practice.) _Don’t tell me truth hurts. (Cause it hurts like hell.)_ He tears at the miserable, wretched creature, stabs into the gaunt belly. It is like cutting into ash. He had expected blood. Instead, there is none. Instead, there is nothing. Then he looks up. The floor waving, the walls crumbling. _Get the hell out of here._

He runs. Don't look back. He looks back. Harry Potter standing like a statue, arms outreached and mouth open to yell. Blowing away like ash. Like the end of a cigarette in a strong wind. In the distance, Severus hears a cry. The caw of crows far, far overhead, circling. Do not look for vultures. As he runs, the goblins call, _plums and grapes, citrons and dates, come buy, come buy!_ The plates are not gold but unhewn stone, the cups are only made of paper. The fruit sits out, rotten and miserable, sick and repellent. Mold-covered, maggot-eaten. Black as earth, black as death. _Come buy, come buy!_

Don’t look back, Severus. Run. Don’t look at the rot-colored sky falling down around you. Don’t listen to their calls, the fright and the screams. Don’t listen (you never did before). _Don’t look back, don’t look back._ Grit the teeth, run until the lactic acid cramps your thighs, until you taste the metal of it in your mouth like blood. Run, run, run. You know the first rule of bringing back the dead. Ask Orpheus, ask Lot. Never look back, like Dylan in his movies.

_Run, run, do not look back or we should live in salt._

 

* * *

 

What will you find in the center of the labyrinth? What is in the darkest spot of the earth? We descend down, past the crust, into Hell. Into the Kola Superdeep Borehole. The temperature climbs, Virgil guides us, Theseus and his monster. What is in the center?

Theseus finds only himself, standing reflected in a mirror.

 

* * *

 

Light again. Persistent bugger. Severus wakes like a man from the dead. He wheezes, driving the oxygen back into his lungs, expanding hoarsely. His legs cramp up from the surfacing. Aches and pains. Relax, relax, relax. All good Legilimencers know the way the body reacts to abandonment, screaming in fear, strewing pains in the road. To delve deeply, to leave your body entirely and visit another, the deep levels, that always means agony and discomfort. He works his knuckles into the calves, the little convulsions.

“Did it work?”

“I killed it, if that’s what you mean.” _It better have worked. She promised._ Fear settles in the nervous parts of him. In his gums, between his teeth, the cartilage between his bones. The white meat of his chest; the dark of his thighs.

“What about Harry?”

“Wait,” he says, grim as a storm, “and see.” _She said he’d wake up. She promised._

They put cool wet cloths on the boy’s forehead, murmur nothings. Dip, wring, pat. Repeat.

He prays. Not in a church (never in a church). When does Severus not have his skinny back pressed up against a wall, begging for something? _Who would have thought I would pray for you, Potter, you fucking goddamn idiot. I hate you. (I do not. I hate that I do not.)_ Sometimes he wishes that he still was a churchgoing man. His mother had dragged him, every year from infant to seventeen. His father was an Anglican man, good ol’ C-of-E type, but his mother whispered her prayers in Slavonic. It’s strange not being reconciled to yourself. Severus is English on the outside, something else entirely within. Confession was never common at his father’s church but sometimes he aches for it. Who else can wipe him clean of his mistakes? No one. His eraser can’t manage. He is a page of parchment, scribbled over in graphite and ink, torn where the eraser couldn’t do the job.

“Can we give him anything?”

"No."

There are no potions for this, for pulling a man out of where he lies, waking him up from bleak blackness. He would boil frogs alive if it would help. (Perhaps, conversely, he should pull seeds from a pomegranate, tuck them between Potter’s lips, lash him to this earth. This one, never the other. Beyond. Separate.) _Come back, abdicate. Give up your crown. Come back to me (you have never been mine, I have no right to you)._

They pass the hours. Days. Potter doesn’t wake. Severus and Minerva sleep in shifts. Four hours on, four off. He lies awake at night in his saggy bed. The dust of the market still stuck in his nosehairs. He fumbles at himself with the enthusiasm of a used car salesman. Smell of the exhaust pipes and oil slick. He doesn’t think of anything. Steel pistons, boat whistles, coal dust. What does he have to bring with him to bed? Nothing. A glass of water, a tab of Alka-Seltzer, the memory of Potter’s wild eyebrows, never lying flat, a bramble of hair. Will he sleep? It’s hard to tell. His body aches, his eyes carrying their bags. Exhaustion painted in the greyness of his face. _I have kept you safe. You miserable, absolutely worthless waste of air._ (He has kept Potter safe, over and over and over again. The sickening thing, down there at his core, he would do it again.) Exoskeletons take all the wear and tear, protect the fleshy insides from harm. Oysters against the sea, curling up around their pearls, letting the sand batter at their unpolished and unimpressive outsides. Harry within, Severus without.

When he is not lying awake in bed, he Apparates to Cokeworth. The Six-Legged Mare on the corner of two streets with a broken lightpost. The stairs to the door smell like piss, vinegar, stale beer. He fumbles at the pint glass. A bit of amber lager. It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday. The man at the piano, playing a memory of a melody. Severus snarls, sick of history. He looks at his hands. They look like his father’s. Clammy, too easily damp, like his father’s. He had hated holding Tobias Snape’s hand, hated the way it was too tight, too moist. Their hands, long and sallow, the repellent black-haired knobby knuckles. His father, whispering _“Just wait until we’re home. Get the belt.”_

No one writes love stories about hands like his. Stained (but they are clean). The nails impossibly short, bitten to the quick, the cuticles a ruin. The hair like a hobbit. No, there are no Byronic heroes with hangnails. Severus is a scientist, he knows that there is no intelligent design driving evolution. He knows that some adaptations are a mistake, fail to thrive. What is he? A failure. Cast back on, try again.

On his way back, he passes the graveyard. Quiet. There is an open ditch, six feet deep, like a mouth ready to accept a bite. He has always been told to hold his breath when he passes by graveyards, as if the dead are lonely, as if they’ll steal in through his nose, his mouth, draw out his own life through osmosis. He doesn’t want to be buried. It’s too much to think of his bones tossed in the pit. In the pine box encased in its concrete sarcophagus, hundreds of pounds of dirt filled in. No one will keep his grave, no one will bring flowers. No, it’s better to burn him instead. He has always felt afraid of earth. There’s too much in him, holding him down in caves, under soil, where the worms and the weevils burrow. It will get in his mouth. No, he’d rather be tossed into an oven instead. Cremation. A little dust-up. He wonders what Potter would want. They may need to consider it sooner rather than later. _Wake up, wake up, wake up._

Ashes to ashes, then; dust to dust.

 

* * *

 

“Severus, I have something to say to you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” He shivers. It’s like winter in here, these tall towers. Castles have never been known for their insulation. The cold and exhaustion picking at him, needling him. He’s always been too skinny to be properly warm anyway, though he prefers the winter.

“I thought the worst of you this year, while the Carrows ... That is, I didn’t -” Minerva isn’t good with apologies. Neither is he. He thinks of razors, words of aconite and cyanide. No, that will prolong things. He says nothing instead. “You should eat,” Minerva goes on, though she hasn’t eaten either. The house-elves have brought a tray. It sits untouched. Flies hover near. A veritable feast of pumpkin pasties, meat pies. Even a bottle of firewhisky. (He considers sending for a cigarette. The house-elves have never indulged that request at express order of one Albus Dumbledore. _Technically_ , Severus thinks, _technically I am the headmaster._ He wonders if that would change. Queer ache. He doesn’t like to think about it. He hates the office, hates the title. It sits _not right_ like an ill-fitting robe. He’d like to take it off. Throw it in the pile next to his bed.)

He sits next to the bed, eyes glassy and unfocused. Dark as burnt resin. His hands yellow-green from the stain of peeling hellebore, the tint of chlorophyll stuck beneath his fingernails. It doesn’t come out. Hellebore, smelling like a skunk, doesn’t come out of his clothes either. He looks at Potter’s unblemished, unmoving hand on the blanket. The suntanned skin, color of summer. His own sickly, stained yellow. _I promise I will never touch_ _you, never stain you. I should not have kissed you. (Pray you do not remember.)_

He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep either. You can go a long time without sleep, especially with resting your eyes, relaxing your breath. That margin between waking and sleeping. Sometimes he wonders if it’s genetic. Maybe, maybe, the insomnia burrows in his DNA, his very pores. He likes to gather stories of illness and disease, hold them up to the light like an X-Ray, look at himself between. What about fatal familial insomnia? He is thirty-eight years old, it often comes on in middle age. There is no cure, there are never cures for prion diseases. A prion is not a virus, it is not bacteria. You cannot blow it up, burst through the cell walls with antibiotics. No, just a simple misfold. There is no medication for a bad folding job. He doesn’t sleep. Maybe that’s the first sign. Paranoia and phobias come next, racing heart panic attacks. He cannot separate these from his usual fare, so he worries more, certain of his own death.

What is the problem? Nothing. Nothing is always a concern. Trelawney asks him over breakfast, _“What’s got into you?”_ Nothing, nothing, nothing. There is nothing on the back of his throat, nothing at the door. Nothing in his heart replicating and filling him, deadly as a heart attack. Nothing is a bomb, sitting in his arteries, waiting to detonate. Slow surface of waking. He comes up to the surface cotton-mouthed, his hand somewhere adjacent to the tip of his dull erection. Through the pipes, he can hear the house-elves cleaning. Dusting. Emptying fireplaces.

 _I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Fuck you, Potter, you and your miserable self, your idiot friends, ruining everything._ In his hate, he thinks of his mother, blackhaired Eileen, called _Elena_ by her own mother, who had washed Severus’ mouth out with tar-scented carbolic soap. He wonders if he had been wanted, assumes that he wasn’t, but there are times when Eileen had let him climb up in her baby powder-scented lap, let him lean against her steady, freckled body, wrapped her long arms about him and told him fairytales. _Baba Yaga_ sometimes, _Ruslan and Ludmilla_ others. Dead now, Eileen. He will never know. Half-dead now, Harry Potter. _You'd better fucking bloody well wake up or I'll throw your corpse to the fish. You've got a lot of nerve pulling this shit, Potter._

Flicks a cigarette stub across the room. (The house-elves will get it anyway.)

He can still hear the goblins in his sleep, their awful cries. _Come buy, come buy!_ What kind of water fattens that fruit? The water of the dead. Rivers that had swallowed Ophelia. Had taken in Virginia Woolf. He reads the Oxford English Dictionary, falls back asleep somewhere between squalor and victoria.

 

* * *

 

“Where are you, bull?” Theseus hisses. It echoes off the stone walls, the empty corners. He looks at the ball of thread, nearly out of length. Yes, he knows, this is the center. And for what? A mirror showing his own miserable face.

He could have seen that in Athens, he didn’t need to come all this way. He balls up one good fist. A healthy punch, slams it into the glass. It shatters like a dropped lantern. Pieces everywhere. Stuck in his knuckles, the skin. Blood running down his palm. He seethes. That should have felt better.

_Careful what you look for._

 

* * *

 

“Harry’s awake.”

“Bully for him,” Severus says from his desk, he doesn’t look up from the meeting agenda for next week’s staff assembly. A migraine hovers behind his left eye. There is a blurry spot on his vision, the pain is a promise, it will come soon. “Shut the door on your way out.”

 

* * *

 

There are a great many places to disappear in a castle. Severus knows them all. Potter might have an invisibility cloak and the indecency of _insisting an audience,_ but he isn't Severus Stonewall Snape for nothing. He picks out the darkest corners, hugs the wall. He keeps to his quarters for a week, sneaks up to his office to fetch the paperwork. When he panics, hearing sounds in the hall, he stays in his office for three days, sleeping on the red-and-gold sofa in the corner.

A month passes. He is very good at this game. Potter will leave eventually. He waits. He is good at biding his time. Impatient in nature but drilled in spite. Yes, he can wait. He will win this game. Everything is a game. A matter of points, a scoreboard. (He doesn't know the score.)

They had waited for Potter to wake up. Held their breath, watched the clocks. After leaving the Hospital Wing, Potter had moved slowly at first. Muscles atrophy quickly during disuse. To get his strength back, he picks up a broomstick and takes to the sky. Severus cannot look outside without seeing the boy in the clouds, sun in his eyes and hair in the wind. It is at the end of August when Potter appears, having camped outside Severus' office. He glares, gathering his robes like his meager dignity, sweeping past him like a dusty broom.

"Wait!" Potter calls.

He doesn't wait. But the seal is broken. After, Severus sees him everywhere, watching him with that long and curious stare. Lying by the lake, reading. Nights on the Astronomy Tower. It is deliberate, this game of cat and mouse. (He will be devoured.)

Potter, from Godric’s Hollow. He finds himself tripping over Godric’s Hollow in articles, saving up facts about the boy without meaning to. A magpie of memory. Why does he hang on to all of that? (Where can he hide it away?) He sees Potter at the lake, huddled over a book. The boy closes it as he approaches. _Death in Venice._ Severus scowls. (When he gets back to the castle, he owls to Flourish and Blotts, requesting a copy.)

 

* * *

 

The delayed Leaving Feast comes at the end of the summer. The last week of August. The end, finally. Thank God. Goodbye, Potter. _Good riddance._

At least, some decent chap has had the sense to put firewhisky in the punch. Severus glares indiscriminately. At the legs of the tables, at the masonry-work, at a napkin. It is really ridiculous, being forced to attend these things. He might be _headmaster_ but no blasted moron worth their breath would think he takes any pleasure in it.

When Potter comes in the room, he spills. Picks up his napkin, wipes it up. Dab, wring, pat, repeat.

The boy and his black-robed arms, spreading them wide, collecting his clutch of friends. They’re getting wasted on the illicitly-spiked punch. Have they torn their school crests from their chests yet? Their colors from their throat? The most macabre set of finals. Boys and girls of magical Britain, drink to your victories. Butterbeer and firewhiskey, a round of shots for everyone. Your robes discarded, your toes loose. What matters now? Not school houses, not unpleasant teachers. No, they fade like a bad dream. You’ve got your futures in your throats, the wind in your faces. The darkness past, what do you have in front of you? _Everything, everything, everything._

He watches Potter from his corner, gripping his unfortunate goblet. Potter and his easy smile, dancing with Granger. Spinning that Weasley bint around the Great Hall. Clapping long-nosed Weasley on the back and casting prank charms on catastrophe-bait Finnegan. It feels like the end of something. A graduation to something, the end of something in his own life. A door is closing. They will go on, friends upon friends. Call back to Hagrid, send owls to Minerva. (Who will owl him? No one. No one and nothing.) _Once, you asked me to dance._ Once, in a castle in a dream, Harry Potter had held out his cool fingertips to Severus, had asked him to stay, asked him to dance. Goodbye, says old blackrobes. No reason to come back, no reason. Don’t say hello. Do keep your distance, Potter. He might be poisoned by his own envy. His own sick want. (That awful admitting, _I want you._ )

Someone has spiked the punch. He’s drunk. He’s maudlin. Forgive an old soldier his little indiscretions. Potter through the warp of the curved glass, in his navy dress robes. That hair like a nest, like a child with a black crayon. Standing at the punch table, swallowing nerves. The sounds pass him, cavort into nothing. No one looks at the mistake in the corner, born out of sync. He leans on the wall, it buckles away from him. No, no one seeks the company of Severus Snape. They put up with him, like a bunion on the foot, like an ant infestation. Some men would have killed themselves with the misery. Not him, not Severus. _None of you should have the satisfaction._ Strange survivor, living on out of spite. Austere. Uniform. Severus who is unchanging; Potter who is mercurial. He can never quite pin the boy down. Potter, who has held bits of torn up darkness within, a blackened soul, and come out unspoiled.

 _Once you held out your hand, you asked me to stay._ (How pathetic, reaching for the hand of a boy.)

Potter comes to his shadowy corner. “Hello,” says the boy with the glass of rum punch. What are you, Harry Potter? You’ve joined the Auror task force. You’re quick as a cat, intuitive. You like milk in your tea, seven-grain bread. Plums, apples, oranges. Once upon a time, you held out your hand to a nightmare of a man. _There are too many years between us._ Are there? Potter has lived too much; Severus has hardly lived.

Severus leans against the wall, tightening his free hand into a fist. “Potter, go away,” he hisses. _You know I dreamt of you for thirty-eight years before I found you. Go away before I make a fool of myself._ He doesn't know what to say. This awful language. Dull words on a dull tongue. Dirt is dirt and fire is fire. He needs new words, what is the word for that space between ache and anger, obligation and compulsion? (He knows how a magnet feels against a piece of steel, how matter feels approaching a black hole. Even empty lungs, aching for air.)

“Did you get some of this?” Potter gestures with the bowl in his hand, a silver spoon dripping with cream. Raise an eyebrow. It doesn’t work to scare Potter off (it never really has).

“Some of _what_?”

“Pomegranate trifle.”

“Go bother someone else.”

“I want to bother you. Though you make it _pretty fucking_ hard these days.”

“Let me rephrase that for you since clearly English is not your strength. _Leave me the bloody fucking fuck alone, Potter._ ”

Potter doesn’t blink, scooping more trifle. “No.”

“Why? Are you that much of a masochist?”

A shrug, “I’m used to it.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“So you tell me.”

“Potter.”

“Sure you don’t want any? The kitchen house-elves really knocked it through the hoop.”

He wants a cigarette. Ridiculous thing, quitting. It’s always like this, out of sync and unprepared. Potter never does the decent thing of reading from the rulebook. Severus glowers instead.

“I just came to say thank you,” Potter drops his voice. “For doing what you did.”

“ _Don’t_ mention it.”

“You’re always saving me.” He looks up. “Why?”

“Don’t you _dare_ try to cast me as some asinine, misunderstood Byronic hero, you brain-addled dung beetle.”

Potter has the decency to snort. “God forbid.”

“You’re laughing at me,” Severus says, Antarctica-voiced.

“No,” Potter and his smile, “Believe it or not, I think you just made a joke.” He takes a bite of his dessert, licks the spoon. “They have support classes for that, I think, you know.”

“If you cannot have a serious conversation and have meandered over here for _liberal_ verbal abuse then, by all means -”

“Why don’t you just give up,” Potter says, “And admit you’re an arse. I already know.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Look, I know that. I kind of _like that_ about you. You aren't going to scare me.”

“You do not understand-“

“What?”

“ _What I am, Potter, what I have done.”_

“I know everything he asked you to do, Severus,” Potter says in his quiet way, “And I know you did it.” (Well, isn’t that the real gutpunch?)

The glare of coal. Of pencil scribble eyes. “And you _think_ that you understand me, do you?”

“No,” Potter says, even as a salt flat. “But I won’t ask you why. And I don’t care.” Harry Potter holds out his hand to Severus. He keeps it low, shielded from the rest of the party by his own body. “I just wanted to see if you want to dance sometime.” The light catches the side of the boy’s face, the bit of stubble, the stained-glass stare. _You remember everything._

Severus and his dyspeptic fits, his acid reflux. He thinks he might be sick. Potter disappears into the crowd. Severus swallows, looks at the clock on the far end. He's managed enough of an appearance. Yes, they owe him this reprieve.

He flees.

 

* * *

 

It is long, long after the party. The hours have stretched into the black of midnight and beyond. Severus has let the fire die. He is nothing but spit and worry, this barest scaffolding of hope. He looks at the door. Looks again. Minutes stretch into hundreds of years. He is nothing of substance, there is no meat on him to gnaw at. A mosquito would go hungry if it bit him.

Let me tell you a story of a man in his little stone room, deep in the dungeons of a castle flung out into an Unplottable forest. It is late. Severus in his armchair, the bottle of firewhisky half-empty. He can smell the burn like petrol from the bottle. From the little bit left on his lips. He waits. Terrified of a knock at the door. His body thrums. _It’s like waiting for the executioner._

(No, he is lying again. Let me tell you the truth about the fireflies in his blood, the truth about the electricity in his nerves. _Please, please, please god, I need you._ He looks to the door at every sound, aching for a rap at the door. Have you ever fallen in love? Have you ever watched the lights come on across a continent from a satellite? The network of bright points flaring into existence across the dark? That is the feeling of love stealing across your body, lighting the torches of your nerves, each checkpoint blazing into existence saying _yes yes yes please more._ )

Severus is a flicker of light in the dark, waiting for the sun to knock.

He has showered carefully. The same carbolic soap. He’s never bought another kind. It smells like tar but he’d rather smell like tar than lavender. The aisles at the shops confuse him, the list of perfumes, of scented soaps. He turns tail back to the familiar. So he washes, clean as a whistle. (He’s never had good luck with his hair. Coarse, greasy business. He’s never understood that the body abhors dryness, that to apply stripping and acidic products, caustic soaps and shampoos, causes the body to overproduce, to make up the difference. He strips himself of his own oils. His trusty body, thinking better than he does, puts it right back by lunch.)

When the sound comes, the hesitant knock at the wooden door, he nearly throws up on his leather shoes. Get up, through the dark round the sofa, the armchairs, the little table and its firewhisky. The twists and turns of his dark room like a maze. The light peeking through a crack under the door. (Tell us, Severus, when you get to the end of the maze, what do you find there?)

"You shouldn't be here."

“I’m sorry,” Potter says, loitering in the door, Severus as stiff and dark as an iron fireprod. “I shouldn’t have assumed, you know, but -”

"But rules don't apply to _you,_  do they now, Mr. Potter?"

"Fuck you, Snape," Potter hisses. His perfectly-formed words on that perfectly-formed mouth, yes, this crackle of anger. Potter and his lightning rod, how can Severus be blamed?

 _Fuck you._ Severus Snape takes a step forward, pushing against the fool brat, one swift rush of breath, and kisses him. He bends down, those few inches between them. Stop fighting your own polarity. The broken sound comes from one of them, perhaps both. Harry is the sun. All things turn to the sun. _Finally, god, finally, I need you, god, you have no idea. I have never needed anyone like this, I will die without you._

Yes, yes, yes, how does it go, the story of the wave finally meeting the shore? The meteor finally crashing upon land? Severus, the overthinker, who has ceased in his thought, his pale, yellow-tinted hands with his bitten cuticles coming up to grip at Harry’s shoulders, to pull against the wool of the red sweater. His dark sleeves of his robes like batwings, yes, but also like a strange curtain to a secret world. Have you ever kissed and lost your heart? Severus has his heart in his mouth, his pulse in his mouth. Harry crushes against him, his lips parting like tucking your tongue between orange slices. The sharp ache of want, of need, of this, this, this. _Oh my god, let me die now. Finally, please._ (If he dies, he will die completed.)

Harry keens against the professor’s touch, against the hungry mouth that pulls at his own. Salt to salt, earth to earth. Flowing at a tide back and forth into each other. Harry’s soft mouth pressing kisses to the closed and furrowed eyelids, the eel-dark brows, the sharp nose. He rubs his face against Severus’ stubble. Severus, the same, relishing the burn of Harry’s beardstart, the way he will carry this memory with his body into tomorrow. Harry noses up into Severus’ dark fall of hair, his fingers touching, touching, touching. This is an old story, they have been telling it for years and years, waiting for that end. Severus and the middle of the labyrinth, what they each found at the end of their thread.

“Well,” Harry says, a smile on that ridiculous mouth, that grinning mouth, those eyes with that shared secret. (Who would have thought it would be shared with Severus Snape, that not all dark things are lost. That sometimes the little darknesses are coal and we light them with fire to keep us warm? Severus is burning, burning, burning, lit by the very sun.) Harry and his hand cupping Severus’ neck, his sharp jaw, his heaving breath. “Are you going to invite me in?”

 

* * *

 

It is dark, he moves through the room with only his muscle memory. Yes, he knows the dark, he knows the curves of his room, the corridors around tables and dirty laundry. He knows the paths the way the Minotaur had known his own labyrinth. The way a floorboard creaks like a lighthouse in the night, telling a ship where to go. Heartbeat. _Thump thump thump._ Sweat now, on his forehead, down his sticky back. He wonders about his breath, his fingernails. _I did not expect you, you did not give me enough time._

Harry falls into the bed, his arms never moving from Severus, pulling him down with him. Knock the books to the floor. The inkstained sheets. The mattress whines. He presses his chest against the other’s, his hips grinding against Harry. _Yes yes yes yes you do not know how I need you._

Harry, his mouth so close against Severus’ neck. This is the way the clay must have felt when God had breathed the air into it. (He might die, his air is cut and tank is empty. How do you surface without air? Common sense would dictate to hold your breath but science works against us there. No, air will expand as you rise, as the water pressure abates. No, no, cast the air from your lungs. To keep your airways clear, you must surface screaming all the way.)

He moves his hands up and down the boy’s stomach, across his solar plexus, working up under the cotton shirt. Harry moans, his eyes tightly closed, his hands wrestling up Severus’ shirt. Tearing at the buttons, rushing it over his head. After so long, they should know patience. They do not. He gasps at the cold air on his body. Harry and his reverent hands, his priest hands, making offerings to the gods. Harry runs his mouth along the divot at Severus’ throat, the razor-sharp collarbones, sucking at the skin like a leech. He will leave marks. _Yes, yes, yes, leave them. I will connect the dots later, I want to remember where you have been._

He is glad for the dark. Wears it like a blanket over his head. Harry runs his hands along his sides, nosing at mysteries on the map. _Am I alright? Tell me what is the worst, let me fix it._ It is hard to focus on Harry, although he has pawed at this for years, dreamt at this for years. His same old miserable self standing in the way, asking where he is found lacking, embarrassed to be laid bare. Harry’s hands down the twisting hallways of his body. _Don’t look at my eyes, bloodshot, the miserable bags. Don’t look at my skin, thin now and lined. Liver spots a bit. That weird mole._ He is conscious of the jut of his ribs, the grey in his hair and skin, the dirt below his nails. His father had once told him that his knees looked funny. He had never once thought about his knees until then but he is self-conscious of those too. _Don’t look at my barren self._

“Severus,” Harry says, “You’re thinking too much.”

_How do I love you? Have you ever seen the way a fire loves the earth? The way it races across a patch of dry land, obsessive and consuming? The fire never thinks of anything but earth, of uncovering every part of the earth, swallowing it up. It spits nothing out, leaves nothing after. After us (after I touch you, after you touch me) there is nothing but ash and air. I love you. I love you. I love you. You were gone once (you are back again). They say do not eat the fruit of other worlds, you will never return. I will eat all of you, swallow all of you. Remake me in your image, ground me to you. I will never leave. Rule side by side in our realm of fire and dirt._

Severus mouths at Harry, afraid of biting, afraid of the sharpness of his own teeth. There had been bitterness in his mouth before (ash, cold earth), and there is bitterness again (Potter, curved into his mouth). Different now, this time there are strong hands in his hair and a man whispering _yes yes yes god Severus yes._ Do not eat the food of the dead, so Severus swallows the living.

The velvet-soft touch of a hand upon his face. Harry and his arms wrapping up, strong-muscled and wiry, this lithe form. Young Ganymede, Zeus would have kept you for himself. Harry and his arms around Severus’ neck, his shoulders, his skinny back. What is this gentleness? He needs a bilingual dictionary, look up these touches and see what they mean. _Let me touch you the way a butcher touches his art, let me know you deep down. It isn’t right to want you the way I do, you should not encourage this, allow this. I want to see the cartilage between your bones, to know how you fit together. The striations of your muscles, this clay and dust that makes up Harry Potter. All atoms are the same, the same basic electrons and neutrons, so how do you add up to something so different from myself? We are not that different, realistically. You have one head, two hands, ten fingers, one heart. I have one head, two hands, ten fingers, one heart. If I hate my own self, shouldn’t I hate you? (If I love you, shouldn’t I love myself?)_

_Don’t answer that._

“You have no idea,” Harry whispers, “How many times I have thought about you. You and that stupid voice, that ridiculous and _very sturdy_ desk. Did you ever look at me in class,” the voice goes on, “Did you ever think about fucking me up against that desk? I’m a Seeker, Severus, I am _very_ limber.” _Yes yes yes, you filthy explosion of light._

“Go on, you deviant brat,” he says. He thinks that he manages to say it at least, though Harry’s hand has curled around his cock, wet with his own slick, his own obnoxious ache. Harry swipes from the tip, pumps him lazily. His dick as red as rust, as apples, autumn leaves and angry Mars. A matador’s cape. He looks at himself in the other’s fist, crying out. He bites at Harry’s shoulder to keep silent.

“I want to hear you."

_Anything you want._

Back and forth like an oil pump. A piston. He clutches fitfully at the wiry muscles of Harry’s shoulder. Harry and his calm harbor. “I’ve got you,” the boy whispers, “I’ve got you.”

Severus’ hand covers Harry’s own, stilling the tides.

“What is it?”

He doesn’t know how to ask. “I want -”

“What do you want?” Harry presses kisses into the curve of his jaw, the negative space behind his ear. Buries his nose and mouth in the professor’s hair. _I don’t know how to say it._ Harry seems to sense the uncertainty, pulls the skinny fingers to his mouth. Kisses the knuckles. First the rises, then the valleys. “Do you want to fuck me, Severus? Do you want me to make you forget your name? I want that.”

 _God yes._ He learns the language of give and take, touch and go. Harry quietly anticipates his hesitation. They are neither of them experienced; they do not laugh at each other. What Severus had not expected was that Harry would smile, that foolish grin pressed into his chest, his sides, his hips. That making love is more than ache and desperation, that sometimes we tip over into joy.

It is a new skeleton key. A new code. A new language. He stands in front of a map never before opened, watching the paths spread out into a myriad of directions for joy. Yes, love is never a single path to the heart. We do not know how we came or how we will go on. But we go. Left or right, backward or forward, carrying this hope of love in our mouths.

As he descends into Harry, he doesn’t think of labyrinths and dusty castles. He measures the warmth against his skin, counts the steady heartbeat against his palms, the breath against his face. _Alive, yes, yes, yes. You are alive. You are healthy and solid. I can taste you, I can feel you as certain as my own self. Let me wrap up in you, if you surround me, I know that you are safe. Yes, you are alive. I would do anything for you. Do you know that?_

_I love you. I cannot tell you that. Not in words._

_Trust me._

Harry moans. Needy noises spill from that mouth, that awful, wretched, impertinent (perfect) mouth. Wait, he would like to grab a cup, one from the table, collect all the noises that Harry spills. Inside, his skin against skin, the within of Harry. He fills the boy up, his blood running through Harry’s own arteries, veins, little capillaries. Harry’s blood, young and wild, pounding through that ancient labyrinth of Severus’ heart. Without eyes and without fingers, he counts the little cells, the bones of Harry’s spine. _One two three four._ How do we know the edges of ourselves? Eye to eye, who is looking back? Yes, yes, yes. They shift their tectonic plates together, the snap of their hips, the heat centering and _pressing pressing pressing._ When he comes, it bursts forth from his clay, from his cold earth. A violence of magma, white hot and into the sky.

 _Breathe._ (He cleans them up. A forgotten pair of boxers next to the bed. Threadbare and Severus-stained, threadbare and now Harry-stained. Dip, wring, pat, repeat.)

Harry curls up in the space between Severus and his own arm. Warm, strong-heart, his mouth trailing poetry on Severus' skinny, sallow-boned chest. Severus counts the details, remembering them for when he will not have them later. _You have six freckles on your left shoulder, a dark mole on the right side of your chest, there, just above the nipple. Your hair is dark between your legs, hot as a brand._ He wonders what the exact temperature of Harry is when he comes. He would have liked to have measured it, written it down, come back to it later. Instead, he measures the negative space between his arm and his torso. The gap. Strange, the boy fits perfectly.

“You smell good,” Harry whispers.

“I smell like formaldehyde and cigarettes, you clod.” _Don’t lie to me. Don’t, don’t, don’t you dare ever lie to me._

“I know,” Harry says, shrugging. Strange how even that looks effortless, beautiful. (Severus and his pedestals.) “And hellebore a bit too. I like it.” (What a ridiculous notion, liking stinking hellebore, the poisonous plant smelling like acidic coffee. A plant that burns skin if touched too long. Ingestion will kill you. In small doses, it will act as an emetic, induce vomiting, save you from most poisons. Severus, the hellebore peeler.) He reaches out to the heart-shaped face, his disbelieving fingers brushing the hair from Harry’s eyes. Those insect-leg lashes, that batwing hair. Absinthe-eyed and pomegranate-mouthed. This torment of the past year, since Harry had looked up over a piece of parchment, over some manner of Order business, with his strange and decided set to the jaw, that familiar fury in the neck. _I hate you, I will die for you._ (Is it so unusual to love a thing into the ground? That had been the first night. He had woken stuck to his sheets, sticky-pantsed, muttering something about _dignity._ )

“You don’t have to be so careful.” _Don’t I? I will stain you where I touch you, you should take better care of yourself, don’t let me near. Have you ever seen me let go of anything? Don’t you dare leave me here. Like a barbed wire, I will tear you on the way out. Stinging nettles. Look at my yellow hands, the stain of peeling hellebore. Do you think you can ever go anywhere without the stink of it now? The places I love best will turn yellow from my touch, will smell the most. You will not be able to walk down Diagon Alley without everyone knowing. There he goes, the old Potion Master’s catamite._

“No,” Harry breathes, “You really don’t know, do you?”

 _Know what?_ The swell in his chest, up his shoulders. Electricity running to an old lamp, plugged back in. Old flint and tinder, found in a lost bag. It still works, it still strikes fire. You do not use new wood for the biggest fires, any arsonist knows that. (Harry is the sun, he can manage a fire. Like to like.)

Lily, whom he had wanted to love and had not, not really. (Harry, whom he had wanted to hate. Tripped over his own long feet, wound up loving instead.) We do not get to choose. _When it becomes too much, drunk as hell, when I fuck it all up and tell you that I love you, understand that I never wanted to. You shouldn’t have to have this. Understand that I tried to wash it off, lock it up in a safe, tried to burn it up._

_What don’t I know?_

“I love you, you absolute difficult git,” Harry is smiling into Severus’ pale neck, his fish-belly skin, his lips against the silverfish scar. _I love you._ The smell of the sea, the rush of air when we race boats, the wind too fast past our mouths, too quick to breathe. The summit of a mountain, a ferris wheel. The casting of a spell, the first hint of spring. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

He doesn’t say anything. There are no words in the barrel of his gun. He traces the curves of Harry’s abdomen, naming the muscles beneath the skin. His long scholar’s fingers thumping the boy’s ribs like a xylophone, counting each one as he goes. _I want to know every part of you._ If he can memorize the dictionary, he can learn the nerves and the systems of Harry Potter. _I did not expect you._ (He understands now, the earth and the fire. He understands that forests die without fire, choking themselves to death. Harry rolls him over, pushing him down again, that beloved whisper of _god, you have no idea how much I want to fuck you until you can’t breathe._ Takes him in hand, both of them together, his hand like a storm wave. _Yes yes yes yes, god, yes._ )

There is no negotiating with _want._ Severus wants to strip their surroundings away. The bed, the floor, Hogwarts, the long march of the past. Only he, only Harry. Even sight and sound are unnecessary. Just this, their bodies scraping against each other, trading swells for divots, interlocking cells. He is a jealous thing. A rough thing. (Maybe Harry is too. It is hard to tell yet, but Harry lies there drawing roadmaps on his skin, kissing psalms into his skinny ribs, the convex space between his hips. Yet he had torn the shirt from Severus’ back, had pushed him to the bed. These in-between beats of patience and impatience.) Yes, let there be nothing between them, nothing between us. Nothing between _I love you_ and our eardrums, if you can say it, whisper it right there, where it is safe.

 

* * *

 

“Have you moved in then?” The signs of occupation. Harry’s sweater on the back of the couch. _Quidditch Weekly._ Earl Grey tea nestled in the drawer next to Severus’ preferred Ceylon. He picks the sweater up, holds his nose in it as he had held it between the boy’s hips, his thighs. It smells like wool, yes, but also his rockpool sweat, his cedarwood cologne. Harry blinks, looking up from over his paperwork. Ministry onboarding documents. The usual. Direct Gringotts deposit, expense reporting, _in case of grievous bodily harm._

“Yes,” Harry says. “When you weren’t looking.”

“I looked,” Severus says. A glare with no heat in it. A swat at the boy with a rolled up _Daily Prophet._ Harry laughs. It echoes in his room, warms it up inside.

“I put you down as my emergency contact.” (Severus swallows. Is this how domesticity happens? Accidentally? He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t want to interrupt. He always winds up rocking the boat.) “Is that alright?” Harry looks up from under daddy-long-legs lashes, his imp-grin.

“ _Someone_ has to save you from yourself.”

“You’re the best at it.”

“The most practiced, you mean.”

“That too,” Harry smirks.

Severus presses his finger into the orchid’s soil. It is dry as a bone. “You might as well make yourself useful. Fill up that watering can.” Harry takes the galvanized metal can, runs it under the kitchen tap. He comes back, offering it to Severus. Little watering cans. Severus and his too much, Harry and his own. Spilling over into each other, saying _can I carry that for you?_ It’s different with four hands instead of two. Atlas had only his own shoulders, Hercules might have offered more.

“Why are you watering that?”

“What do you mean?”

“The stick? Isn’t it dead?” Harry frowns at the brown chips, the dry soil. The little shoot sitting budless in the indistinct sun.

“It flowers again, if you take care,” Severus murmurs. He can be patient when he wants to be. He is good with potions, with solutions. He dissolves minerals and orchid nutrients into water. He soaks the dirt and lets it drain. Sprays the leaves, the little shoot. Harry watches him work. Severus studies the sunlight, wondering if it is too bright, if he should move the plant again. Orchids burn, meant for covered places. Be judicious with the light.

Tell me, what do you find in the center of the maze? The center of dark things, tension and fear, suspicion and doubt. Severus and his lantern, held up to a mirror, tell, tell me, what did you see? Himself. His own haggard, lined, broken-apart face. Yes, we know. But after that? After he broke the mirror, after he licked the blood from his blackhaired knuckles, picked out the little pieces of glass?

A boy, standing uncertain, holding out his hand, holding the other end of the thread. Harry and his bright eyes, his bright face, holding up a watering can to a sub-canopy plant with twisting roots, hoping for a little sun. Severus shifts uncomfortably. Overthinking again. Harry stands behind him, winds his strong arms around Severus’ chest, his chin on the wool-covered shoulder.

 

* * *

 

In Athens, hundreds of years later, someone had asked, “What’s that then?” The Athenians looked out at the harbor, shielding their eyes from the sun. The old ship, half-covered in zebra mussels and moss, had sat there with its thirty oars.

“That’s his ship, eh? Theseus’ ship.” Theseus, king of Athens, king of men, who had raised his hand and said _fine, look, I’ll do it_ and sailed off somewhere dark. He’d been distracted on his return, had forgotten to raise the white sails. His father, Aegeus, had pitched off from a cliff into the sea. Had given it his life and his name.

“That was centuries ago, it would have all rotted out,” the doubter says, missing the point of stories entirely.

“We replace the wood as it goes,” they say.

“Why?”

“He saved us from the Minotaur, you know. It’s really the least we can do.” _He looked into the darkness. He never told us what looked back._

"Nasty business, that Minotaur. Most heroes are wrecks. Was he a wreck then, after?"

The Athenians shrug. No good remembering the dull bits. Maybe he woke up on Sundays and made eggs, fed his hens, went to market. _Come buy, come buy!_ Maybe he made love on Thursday nights. We don't know, the quotidian march of stillness makes for stale stories and happy lives. No one remembers the one about the quiet sea.

 

* * *

 

Let us move on. It is months later. (It is the privilege of poets and storytellers to ignore the onward and dull plodding march of time. Let us skip ahead to the good stuff.)

Harry sits at the edge of the large freshwater lake next to Hogwarts. Severus spies him from the stairs, stalks over, covering the distance with long strides. Students and their lazy September weekends hustle by, off in the horizon. It is strange to not count Harry as one of them, to set him apart. Severus studies the water of the lake, the insects skating on the surface tension. The strange and carnivorous bladderwort sticks out, its little gold flowers turned up to the sun. Water lobelia, pondweeds. Not much thrives in the acidic waters of this lake, but he knows that there are European eel and northern pike in there, Eurasian minnows and sea trout. Three-spined stickleback. He might have been a fisherman once, selling his gutted catch at market. _Come buy, come buy!_

He draws near to Harry. The boy looks up, blinking in the brightness. "Fine day," Harry says.

Severus grunts. His hands shield his eyes from the sun. He isn’t sure what he is looking for. The giant squid, perhaps. Harry watches him. When Harry’s eyes come to rest on Severus, he is always surprised, he is still surprised. He expects a frown, a scowl, their comfortable old enmity. He does not expect the light breaking through the dark, the crack of a door, the sun rising over the earth. Harry says something to Severus, something dull about the day, it does not matter what it was. It floats to him, murky, as if underwater. As if they walk on the bottom of the lake. The sky looms as blue as it had in ancient times. Pre-labyrinthine times. Before a ceiling had been built. He wants to ask again. To ask every day. “Do you love me?” (He is a monster still, he will always have his old and twisted heart, so there is more to that question that he does not say. _Do you love me? Only me? Does it hurt? I need you to stop breathing when you think of me. I need it to ache like a gunshot. Will you let me consume you?_ )

“Yes, god, Severus, yes, always.” Harry takes the professor’s knotted hands, those old fingers like skinny treebranches, pulls them up under his cotton shirt. The hands against Harry’s ribcage, separated from his heart by only skin, by only muscle, mere bone. _Yes, I love you,_ the boy’s heartbeat seems to say, _knock and I will answer._

Here we have come to the end. All stories and their same structures. Exposition and rising action, the climax and the fall. The ship has been sunk, so now we must find ourselves washed up to shore. How do we tell the end of the story? All lovers know that we are sailors always, hoping the sea will be calm. Some ships sink, most make it home to port. Orchids can flower again. If there is a way into the dark, there is a way back out again. If you have a heart (the old ticker, the curse of all men), you can fall in love.

Severus and his beating heart, his bitten nails, his comfortable scowl, laid bare to the sky. He has known it from the start, Severus Snape is not a man who does anything by halves. He falls in love. He falls in with all of himself at once. He falls in love for himself at seventeen and lying on the hood of a car in a Cokeworth car park, asking _mother should I build the wall?_ At twenty with blood under his nails, catching rats. Thirty-one, blackrobed at a High Table, watching a scarred boy be Sorted. Thirty-eight now and desperate, with a soft hand on his back and a voice saying _come back to bed, Severus._ He falls in love for all of himself at once.

He checks the land he’s in, the land of the living. (An echo in the back of his memory of high-pitched goblin cries. _Come buy, come buy!_ ) Harry smiling, brushes his hand across Severus’ own, light in his eyes. _You have seen it all, you know the worst of it, the measure of my want. You haven’t left. You idiot boy._

Be careful what you look for; be careful of what you might find. Why do we tell stories? The same old tale in new settings, new characters (same old hearts)? How can we expect something new? Dig up the old remains of the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. There is nothing different about their hearts, their clumsy hands. So it goes, all of us, our bitter hearts. There is nothing new about love under the sun.

Harry opens the bag, there on the shore of the lake. Offers half of the pomegranate to Severus. “Here,” he says, “Try some.”

“You have a veritable feast. Expecting someone?” He looks at the laid-out blanket, the basket of wine and fruit. Apples and oranges, citrons and dates. The half pomegranate in the palm of his long hand. Food of the living.

“I packed extra,” Harry says, smiling, “I thought you might come by.”

 

 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

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